Five books about the horror of girlhood

Damien Angelica Walters is the author of The Dead Girls Club, forthcoming in December 2019, Cry Your Way Home, Paper Tigers, and Sing Me Your Scars, winner of This is Horror’s Short Story Collection of the Year.

At Tor.com she tagged five "books that delve into the secrets and darkness of girlhood," including:

The Corn Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates

“The Corn Maiden” is a novella included in Oates’ collection The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares. After a field trip to view the Onigara exhibit of the Sacrifice of the Corn Maiden, Jude, the leader of a group of eighth grade girls, decides they’re going to kidnap and ultimately sacrifice Marissa, an eleven-year-old girl who attends the same private school.

They befriend the girl months before the kidnapping in order to establish trust and, one day after school, invite her to the large house in which Jude lives with her grandmother. There, they feed her drugged ice cream and after she’s unconscious, they carry her into a basement storage room beneath the unused guest wing of the house.

Jude tells the other girls that since Marissa came as a guest, it’s not kidnapping. They build her a bed with blankets and shawls. They clothe her in a nightgown and keep her drugged with Xanax. Jude insists they call her the Corn Maiden. Jude teaches her friends about the sacrifice ritual—the Corn Maiden was slowly starved, she was tied to an altar while still alive, and then shot with an arrow through her heart—but after keeping Marissa captive for six days, the other girls want to let her go.

It’s a chilling look at the group friendship dynamic and how it can easily be corrupted. But it’s also the story of a young, neglected girl trying to find control. Jude “…was infused with the power. The power of life-and-death.” Although Jude is the antagonist, her need to create this sort of order becomes easier to understand as more of her life is revealed. Her actions and the desired outcome are monstrous, but she isn’t a monster. She’s a girl broken by circumstance and desperate for guidance, a lost girl who isn’t missing, and the true horror is that her desperate wish for power ultimately takes control over her. The final scene between Jude and Marissa is both terrifying and heartbreaking. The first time I read it, I was shocked and sat staring at the words in disbelief for some time before I could go on.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue