(The Dunwich Hoarder - Terry L. Estep - Image generated with the aid of ChatGPT)

“The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre,” by Philip Fracassi. Publication date: Sept. 30. 416 pages.

In slasher movies, the “final girl” is the last girl standing to confront the killer. Maybe she lives, maybe she dies, but she usually survives to the end because she’s avoided drinking and drugs and premarital sex along the way.

That convention has been turned on its head multiple times over the years, and Philip Fracassi puts his own spin on it here.

Rose DuBois is a final girl in her late 70s and living in a retirement home. She goes to movie nights, she hangs out with her friend Miller — he clearly loves her but doesn’t want to cross any lines — and goes on shopping trips when her daughter visits. She loves a good mystery novel.

Then the deaths begin.

(Image Provided)

I didn’t even have to make a joke about Jessica Fletcher from “Murder She Wrote” going up against a serial killer because Fracassi beat me to the reference.

There’s a short chapter near the mid-point after the bodies have started dropping — I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say a lot of people die in a book with “Massacre” in the title — and the frightened elderly residents start calling family members to come pick them up and get them out of the danger zone. Several are told variations of the same thing: Now is not a good time.

I think that chapter will haunt me more than any of the kills. It encapsulates so many fears of growing old, losing independence and becoming a burden or being an afterthought to the people who are supposed to love us.

Not bad for a slasher novel.

And it is a good slasher story. The cast has its share of memorable players as well as barely-sketched cannon fodder. The mystery plays fair. If the payoff doesn’t land as smoothly as I’d like, I’ll overlook it because the journey itself was a good one.

I’ve only read one other novel by Fracassi, “Boys in the Valley.” It was a terrifying story about demon possession in an all-boys orphanage in rural Pennsylvania. Now with “Autumn Springs,” he’s cementing himself as one of my favorite modern horror authors.

***

Here are a few short takes on some recent reads.

* “The Omen,” by David Seltzer. A novelization of Seltzer’s screenplay for the 1976 film starring Gregory Peck. The movie kept enough ambiguity for the deaths to be ghastly coincidences. Seltzer’s novel is more direct about Damien being the antichrist.

* “Dune: The Butlerian Jihad,” by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I have a love-hate relationship with these books. I’m hungry for more stories set in the universe Frank Herbert created, but these always strike me as canonized fan fiction.

* “A Rip Through Time,” “The Poisoner’s Ring” and “Disturbing the Dead,” by Kelley Armstrong. Call it “CSI: Edinburgh” by way of “Outlander.” A homicide detective from 2019 finds herself in 1869 Scotland working as a housemaid and solving murders with her employer. I devoured the first three books in the series.

* “Master and Commander,” by Patrick O’Brian. The first of O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels has a lot of battles and historical detail, but don’t ask me to describe the plot. I enjoyed it enough to continue the series.

***

Advance reader copies provided by NetGalley.

***

Terry L. Estep can be reached at testep@newsandsentinel.com.