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