#Spooktober-‘Dead Girls’ by Abigail Tarttellin

About the book…

When her best friend Billie is found murdered, eleven-year-old Thera – fearless and forthright – considers it her duty to find the killer.

Aided by a Ouija board, Billie’s ghost, and the spirits of four other dead girls, she’s determined to succeed. The trouble with Thera, though, is that she doesn’t always know when to stop – and sometimes there’s a fine line between doing the right thing and doing something very, very bad indeed.

Tense, visceral and thought-provoking, ‘Dead Girls’ is the new novel from Abigail Tarttelin, the critically acclaimed author of ‘Golden Boy’.

This is a book that by turns will tear your heart inside out, and leave you caught on the edge of a precipice of emotions-anger, rage, frustration, helplessness all make an appearance as Thera takes on the impossible task of finding her best friend’s killer.

Their games of Ouija boards and detectives, coccooned in the relative safety of their village and surrounding woodlands seem harmless enough, until Thera leaves Billie behind to track a walker, and never comes home.

Set in the 90’s before girls Thera and Billie’s age have been exposed to the news, social media and the terrible knowledge of what grownups want from young girls, sheer pluck and determination drive Thera on to make some truly terrible decisions. Is it her fault? She is 11 years old and suddenly is thrust into a world where sex, paedophilia and death rear their ugly heads. Her efforts to reconcile how someone could want to do what they did to Billie is framed by Thera’s haunting, she sees black dogs who turn into the dead girls, 5 of them, who beg Thera to help them.

They appear to her and tell her their tales, and Thera becomes suffused with the agony of their deaths which is then turned into anger as she realises how woefully unprepared she is to deal with a grownup who takes the life of girls like her. As she explores the psychology of such a monster, a friendship develops between her and a boy who lives in a caravan park. Both outsiders, both crippled with the weight of adult sized guilt , this is an exploration of the growing consciousness of a young girl who weaponises the very thing that makes her vulnerable to predators.

For those who have read , or have seen, ‘The Lovely Bones’, certain themes will be familiar also-there is the central death of a child, the investigation into her murder and the pubescent stream of consciousness of central character Thera.

Her parents and the adults where she lives want to keep the children in the school safe, but even at 11 , Thera knows that telling anyone about the girls who beg her to find their killer will result in nothing more than her being put in her place.

Far too young, she has learnt that the thing that makes the dead girls so special-innocence and vulnerability-is something no one has taught her how to cope with, and this is the central tenet of the novel. The ghosts are the insubstantial remains of the forgotten, the abandoned, the dead who have been used and abused.

It is a reflection on the way that society treats, and disposes of, girls and young women, the way they fulfil a need for the killer and are interchangeable, replaceable and not unique.

What Abigail Tartellin has done is give a voice to the girls through Thera’s narrative, and as it comes to a crushing , totally heartbreaking conclusion, ‘Dead Girls’ leaves the reader undone.

It’s not an easy read, the subject is something which should never be used flippantly as a plot device and is treated with reverence it deserves. Abigail gives names and stories to girls who in the real world, are seen as numbers, faceless victims of murderers whose names become part of the culture.

After all, who can name Fred and Rose West’s victims, Dr Crippen’s wife or more than one of Peter Sutcliffe’s murdered women?

It behoves us, as a society, to center the girls and the women in crimes carried out against them because of the nature of their sex. Not the names of the men who beat, abuse, groom and kill, the women and girls whose lives are destroyed at a rate of 2 a day in the UK (a figure which has sadly remained static for decades). Until we deal with the way that we raise girls to be fighters aginst not acceptors of their vulnerability, they will not be survivors of their progression to adulthood, rather, they face remaining victims of a society that treasures the taking of what makes them so special. That is the real horror of this novel.

About the author…

Abigail Tarttelin is an award-winning author, screenwriter, actress, and musician. As a writer, she is best known for Golden Boy, “a grippingly innovative” coming-of-age novel with a “radical non-binary, pro-intersex message” (Autostraddle). Golden Boy is the winner of an Alex Award from the American Library Association, a LAMBDA Literary Award Finalist for Best LGBT Debut, a Booklist Top Ten First Novel of 2013, a School Library Journal Best Book of 2013, and is published in eight languages.

Also a screenwriter, Abigail has served as a juror for the British Independent Film Awards, and is currently working on the Duck Soup/BBC Films adaptation of Golden Boy. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Glamour, Phoenix, Oh Comely, and The Huffington Post. She is the recipient of awards from The Authors Foundation and The K Blundell Trust in Great Britain.

Links-http://www.abigailtarttelin.com/

Twitter @ajktarttelin @panmacmillan