Girl In Red

The Girl in Red- Christina Henry
Berkley Publishing
Release Date: June 18, 2019

Rating:
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Warning: Potential Spoilers Ahead!

Synopsis: It's not safe for anyone alone in the woods. There are predators that come out at night: critters and coyotes, snakes and wolves. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that doesn't look anything like the one she grew up in, the one that was perfectly sane and normal and boring until three months ago.

There are worse threats in the woods than the things that stalk their prey at night. Sometimes, there are men. Men with dark desires, weak wills, and evil intents. Men in uniform with classified information, deadly secrets, and unforgiving orders. And sometimes, just sometimes, there's something worse than all of the horrible people and vicious beasts combined. 

Red doesn't like to think of herself as a killer, but she isn't about to let herself get eaten up just because she is a woman alone in the woods....

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If you're a fan of horror movies or post-apocalyptic novels, you know the rules. Stay together. Keep your gear on you at all times. Never deviate from the plan. Follow the rules and you live. Don't and Something Bad Will Happen. But what happens when you aren't the hero of the horror movie, but just trying to get to grandma's? 

Red is a twenty year old college student who is addicted to horror movies when the Cough starts. A virus that infects at random, within months the world has changed. Millions are dead, the electricity is out, communications are down.  The military is sending people to quarantine camps for their own good. But Red doesn't believe that.  A naturally suspicious and paranoid individual, she convinces her family they need to hike hundreds of miles through the woods to her grandmother's house, where they would be safe. But even though millions are dead, others are still alive.  And what Red has forgotten about the movies is: it isn't the apocalypse that's the problem.  It's what happens after.

The Girl in Red is one of Christina Henry's (Lost Boy) dark twists on a classic fairy tale, in this case Little Red Riding Hood.  Red is a stubborn, often obnoxiously know-it-all type who isn't less annoying for being right most of the time. She's a loner, paranoid and suspicious, but when the world changes those are some of the best survival skills to have.  She often seems younger than twenty (if I just get to Grandma's house everything will be ok), but also has the world weary wisdom of someone much older.  She doesn't need to learn the hard way that just because someone is human they aren't also a predator, or that there are things even in the post-apocalyptic world that are worse than death.  She knows, as we all do deep inside, that the darkness of humanity doesn't go out just because a Crisis Has Occurred. As emotional as the book is, Red can only function by mostly being in a state of shock or emotional numbness the wholes time.  It is the reader who mourns for the ones who die, because Red can't (which made me feel a little guilty for not especially liking her. Who would be at their best in this situation?).  

The reader also wonders more than Red about the Big Picture.  What is the virus killing people and can a cure be found? How many people are dead and how are others surviving? What really happens at the quarantine camps? What are the monsters and what can be done to stop them? Will civilization be able to rebuild in any way? Red isn't (as she admits to herself) the Chosen One who can discover the answers and solve the world's problems.  She (and the reader) learn more than others might about the monsters in the dark, but she accepts (as the reader must) that it isn't her place to find the answers.  She is the Every Person just trying to stay alive based on knowledge gleaned from genre fiction and the childish belief that getting to grandma's will make everything ok again.  And maybe, in this strange new world, that is the hope that counts the more than anything else.

I recieved an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review