This B Just Won’t Die! by Tanya Pell: A feminist slasher about beauty, survival, and the final girl

Tanya Pell’s This B Just Won’t Die! is a gleefully bloody slasher that uses the conventions of the horror genre to take a much deeper look at the ways women are taught to understand their value through beauty, desirability, and the approval of others.

At first glance, This B Just Won’t Die! has all the ingredients of a fun horror romp. There’s an aging scream queen, a serial killer dressed as the villain from her old movies, a horror convention, a documentary crew, increasingly gruesome deaths, and a Final Girl who seems to have been dropped right back into the role that made her famous. But what makes the novel work so well is that Pell never forces the fun and the feminist commentary to compete with each other. The slasher is genuinely entertaining, while the ideas underneath it are substantial enough to give the story considerably more to chew on than its premise might initially suggest.

Barb Jacobs has spent twenty years trapped inside the role that made her famous. As the star of the Mirror horror franchise, she became a scream queen, but the success came with a price. Hollywood decided what kind of actress she was, and once that box closed around her, it became almost impossible to escape. At forty, she is still trying to find a way to be taken seriously while making a living from signing photographs and appearing at horror conventions. The opportunity to host a new horror documentary seems like exactly the kind of chance she needs to finally move beyond the image that has defined her career.

Then people start dying around her in ways that mimic the kills from her movies, and Barb finds herself playing the Final Girl all over again. The mirrors that feature so prominently in the Mirror movies become one of the novel’s most effective symbols. Even the franchise title immediately evokes the familiar fairy-tale question of who is the fairest of them all, and that idea sits at the center of the story. The women in Barb’s world are constantly being measured against one another. Who is prettier? Who is younger? Who is more desirable? Who gets to be the star? And, in a slasher movie, who gets to be the last girl standing?

That connection between beauty and survival is particularly sharp because Barb has been taught from childhood that her appearance is not simply something she possesses but something she needs to maintain in order to be safe. Her mother is a major source of those lessons. She has learned to use her own beauty to remain desirable to men and therefore maintain access to the security that their attention provides. She passes that survival strategy on to Barb, teaching her that remaining beautiful and wanted is essential because eventually a man will be the person responsible for taking care of her.

There is a painful truth embedded in that lesson: Barb’s mother probably wasn’t entirely wrong about the world she was preparing her daughter to navigate. The problem is that she teaches Barb how to survive within that system rather than how to survive without depending on it. She teaches her daughter to preserve her beauty so that she will always have someone willing to provide for her, rather than teaching her that she needs to be able to provide for herself. And when a woman’s worth has been tied to youth and desirability, getting older becomes more than a natural part of life. It becomes a threat.

---

---

That is where This B Just Won’t Die! digs much deeper than its bloody premise might suggest. The novel is interested in the way women are fetishized by the horror industry, but it also understands that the problem isn’t limited to Hollywood executives or casting decisions. Sexism becomes particularly insidious when women internalize it and begin to police themselves according to the standards they have been taught to accept. Barb has spent so long trying to be what everyone else wants that she barely knows what she wants for herself anymore.

I especially liked Leesa, who may have been my favorite character in the book. And I’m not entirely sure what that says about me, haha. Leesa has a much clearer view of the world than Barb does, and she desperately wants Barb to see it, too. She doesn’t want Barb to keep contorting herself into whatever shape she thinks other people will approve of. She wants her to stop being a people pleaser, stop tearing herself apart over her perceived shortcomings, and recognize that she has value beyond what anyone else thinks of her.

That makes Leesa an important counterpoint to the messages Barb has absorbed throughout her life. Barb’s struggle isn’t simply about escaping the Mirror movies or the scream queen label. It’s about figuring out how to stop seeing herself through everyone else’s eyes.

And Pell never forgets that this is supposed to be a horror novel. The murders and the threat of Mirror Man keep the story moving, while the familiarity of the slasher framework gives Pell plenty of opportunities to play with the expectations surrounding the Final Girl. There is something particularly fitting about a woman whose entire career has been built around surviving fictional killers being forced to confront a killer who has turned those performances into reality. Barb has spent decades performing survival. Now she has to actually survive.

That combination is what made This B Just Won’t Die! such a fun read for me. It is bloody and entertaining, but it also has something real to say about the expectations placed on women, particularly the expectation that they remain young, beautiful, desirable, and agreeable for as long as possible. The horror isn’t just the possibility of being murdered by the villain from your own movies. It’s the realization that you’ve spent your entire life being taught to measure your worth by a reflection that was never really yours to begin with.

Have you read other feminist slashers that use horror conventions to explore the way women are viewed and treated? What did you think of This B Just Won’t Die!? Tell me in the comments!

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Join the conversation

If you love books that stay with you—and enjoy thinking about them long after you’ve turned the final page—subscribe to get new literary analyses and writing tips from Write on the World!

Related Content

• Dollface by Lindy Ryan: PTA politics, plastic masks, and a suburban slasher that’s wickedly fun (Write on the World)
• Not Your Final Girl by Mikayla Randolph review: A slasher that can’t outrun its own past (Write on the World)
• Carry on screaming: Why women are drawn to horror (Harper’s Bazaar)
• Still not over it: Why women (especially) love horror (Cherry Picks)

Now available in print and on Kindle!

Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.