Games For Dead Girls – Jen Williams

When Charlie was eleven, she created a monster…

For Charlie and her niece Katie, it’s supposed to be a quiet holiday in the peaceful, out-of-the-way seaside town of Hithechurch, England. Charlie is researching a book on the folklore of the area, and the gloomy sea and dangerous caves seem to offer up plenty of material, while Katie is just there to run wild and get some fresh air. 

But Charlie’s research reveals a deeper, darker secret, one that uncovers her own, carefully hidden past. Because young women are going missing again: a teenage girl snatched from the beach in broad daylight, and before that, other girls through the decades have vanished from the area, their families left with no answers and no bodies to bury.

Charlie’s creation was a thing of felt, straw, fury, and a rusty pair of scissors in the dark. It couldn’t be her monster. Could it? Charlie is set on discovering the truth about the girls’ disappearances, but she’s about to encounter a force of pure, obsessive malevolence that threatens to destroy anything in its path.

Delightfully creepy and spooky, Games for Dead Girls is a superb mystery folk horror crime story told across multiple timelines and I loved it.

Three timelines – present day Charlie and her niece Katie are off to a caravan park by the sea while Charlie researches a book she’s writing about the area. Then we see Charlie as a young girl in the eighties at the same caravan park, making friends as kids do, playing out all day. And the third timeline set decades earlier. It’s fun trying to figure out how these three stories interconnect and Williams takes her time delivering the story in chunks. Frustrating to jump to a new timeline just as it’s getting interesting, but you’re immediately drawn back to the now, or the then.

Great setting, superbly creepy creation of the character of Stitch-Faced Sue who haunts the dreams of the girls (and yours too as you’re reading!).

Enjoyed this one a lot. Recommended.

Games for Dead Girls by Jen Williams is published by Crooked Lane Books and is out now. Huge thanks to the publisher for an advance copy to review.