Horror is ever changing, and always evolving. It comes in many different types and forms. Short stories are one of my favourites, which is why I requested an advanced reader copy of the collection, Teenage Girls Can be Demons by Hailey Piper. It caught my eye and garnered by attention, creating the type of curiosity and intrigue that many of its peers do.
Now, having just completed the book, I can share my thoughts on this relatively new collection from an author that I don’t have much history with. I did, once, try to read a novel of hers, but struggled to get into it due to the prose and subject matter. I ended up putting it down and didn’t pick it back up.
With Teenage Girls Can be Demons, Hailey Piper is back with an assortment of short stories that mostly centre upon teenage girls, although a couple do not. This narrative assortment then concludes with a novella about a Halloween cannibal, which comprises the latter half of the book or thereabouts. Like a number of the stories, it seems to have been published earlier this decade.
Things begin with a tale about exploding girls on a college campus; their visceral deaths being caused by words boys speak. Other stories are about things like:
- A girl who’s approaching her first period, in a world where it takes the form of bears that follow them around.
- A woman who’s driving home after burying her troubled son, when she sees a massive dinosaur out of the corner of her windshield.
- Teenage girls who turn into musical superheroes, and do battle against an evil woman.
- A blind girl who feels that her mom has been replaced.
- A father and daughter who go on yearly beach vacations, where she’s told to stay away from girls who show too much skin.
- A fifteen year old girl who gets lost while sneaking out to a club in the middle of an ever changing city.
- Girls who suddenly begin changing into prehistoric, dinosaur-esque, birds.
- Two homeless teens who take over a median, and panhandle on it, after a man who’d cursed it dies.
- An abusive orphanage for young girls run by nuns, which is turned upside down when a strange new girl moves in.
- The class reunion for a small, girls only, school, which a former fencer is invited to. If she returns, she must face her past, including a horrible attack on school grounds.
Then, there’s Benny Rose: The Cannibal King, which takes up the last half of the book’s length. This novella is about a small Vermont town, which has a unique Halloween legend about a cannibalistic man who eats children, which is backed up by tales of kids disappearing and a strange hospital fire for which he was blamed. Thirty-four years after the hospital fire, in the late 80s, Halloween night finds several teenage girls and boys attempting to scare a newcomer with costumes and stories. What’s in store for them, though, is more realistic (and hungry) than their potentially made up stories and old clothes.
There’s a somewhat decent assortment of topics and tales to be found within Teenage Girls Can be Demons, but I must admit that it never truly clicked with me. None of these stories blew me away, or really hooked me, but some were (obviously) better than others. The Cannibal novella was one of the best parts, for sure, and I liked some of the stories. Others, I struggled with. Maybe it’s because I’m a middle-aged man, and never dealt with some of the female problems and coming-of-age health things that some of these stories deal with, but it’s not like you need to be female to read this story. After all, I’ve watched, played through and read many horror stories, and a majority of them have had female leads.
Perhaps part of it had to do with reading this collection after Nat Cassidy’s great upcoming one, I don’t know. All I can say for sure is that I didn’t like this book as much as I’d hoped to. It was just OK.
The writing is good, and I have no real complaints there. I just wish that some of the tales had been more fleshed out. There’s no denying that Hailey Piper can write, and that she has a strong imagination, but I found myself kind of wishing this one would end before it did. Still, I read it from first page to last, and didn’t skip one. That’s not my style. In the end, I also must say that I never thought any of it was bad — it was all decent, but didn’t fully click with me or immerse me. Some may like it more, and some apparently did based on other reviews I’ve seen.
Overall, Teenage Girls Can Be Demons by Hailey Piper is a decent but unspectacular and not unforgettable read. It includes some interesting stories, but some lack depth and I was rarely ever hooked by them. Maybe you’ll like it more though.
This review is based on an advanced reader copy of the book, which we were provided with.