Shailee Thompson is a writer and educator and today we’ve got her debut novel, How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates.

Right off the top I’ll let you all know that How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates is a horror/slasher story. It has a lot of fun playing with the genre and that’s why I’m bringing it in for you, but if that’s not your thing right now just mute the next few minutes.

Jamie needs a break from her PhD thesis on the intersection of rom coms and horror movies. Academia can be murder! So Jamie and her best friend Laurie decide to go to a speed dating event at a local nightclub. Dating is hell and the apps are cooked but this should be a laugh. At least each ‘date’ is only ten minutes.

It’s all going so-so, with a few sparks from aesthetically pleasing partners when the lights go out. Not exactly romantic but when they come back on Jamie finds her current date slashed ear to ear as she is thrown into a fight for her life!

It only gets bolder and bloodier from here in How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates but this is a narrative that knows its genre.

Jamie quickly draws on her academic experience to teach the survivors the ‘Rules’; ten vital tricks to staying alive in a slasher film. These are the group's lifeline as they search for an exit and a way to return to the real world. But their villain has their own plan and besides people never follow rules.

Like so many of us Shailee Thompson has come of age in a post Scream world where it’s not enough to simply fill the screen with vicarious gore. The horror films of the seventies and eighties gave a whole generation some freudian insight into human nature and now the post modern slashers of the nineties are spawning their own progeny that know they’re in a story and really want to flip the script.

Thus How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates is part slasher, part rom com, with a protagonist who doesn’t know whether she’s a leading lady or a final girl, and really prefers not to make the choice.

The novel is filled with jump scares, meet-cutes, blood spatter, and sexual tension (not necessarily in that order. From the outset, Jamie’s thesis introduces us to the notion that both genres share a lot in common and the rest of the story goes to extreme lengths to test that theory.

This is a lot of fun…

Genre heads will enjoy the way the tropes are both respected and inverted. Literary nerds can geek out at the high concept meta narrative. Armchair sleuths can try to solve it. Film nerds will love the myriad nods and easter eggs. And we can all enjoy the vicarious pleasure of not being stuck in the story ourselves.

How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates is a knowing, pacy, well written look at the type of story we usually take for granted as entertainment. It reassures us it’s ok to have fun, but also the fun is part of a much more clever and dangerous world.

Being a book nerd has never been so much fun.

Book Club - Shailee Thompson’s How To Kill a Guy in Ten Dates