How to survive your murd.., p.1
How to Survive Your Murder, page 1
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Razorbill,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by Rollins Enterprises, Inc.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Valentine, Danielle, author.
Title: How to survive your murder / Danielle Valentine.
Description: New York : Razorbill, 2022. | Audience: Ages 12 and up.
Summary: Alice is sent back to the night of her sister’s murder and has until midnight to figure out who the killer is or risk losing her sister forever.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022011443 | ISBN 9780593352014 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780593527511 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593352021 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Murder—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. | Horror films—Fiction. | Time travel—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels. | Thrillers (Fiction)
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.V3365 Ho 2022 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011443
ISBN 9780593352014 (HARDCOVER)
ISBN 9780593527511 (INTERNATIONAL EDITION)
ISBN 9780593352021 (EBOOK)
Cover art and design by Vanessa Han
Design by Rebecca Aidlin, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
pid_prh_6.0_140788414_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Halloween Night, Last Year
Three Hours Earlier
Two Hours and Thirty-Three Minutes to Go
An Hour and Forty Minutes Left
Can’t Be More Than Thirty Minutes Now
Showtime
Halloween, One Year Later
Your Friends Aren’t Really Your Friends
Final Girls Do It in A Cornfield
Keep Away from Bad Boys
Watch Your Head
Stay Out of the Cornfield
Was That a Chain Saw?
No One’s Gonna Believe You
Obviously the Cops Aren’t Going to Help You
Don’t Split Up
Flash Sideways
You Know You’re Already Too Late, Right?
You Should Probably Be Running
Come On, It’s Way Too Early in the Night to Die
Every Family Has a Few Skeletons
Carb Up! You’re Gonna Need It . . .
Don’t You Love a Good Midpoint Twist?
Just Under Two Hours Until Midnight
Wear a Seat Belt
Stay Out of the Fucking Cornfield!
The Clock’s Ticking . . .
You’re Not Out of the Cornfield Yet
Of Course He’s Outside
You Think You Can Handle the Truth?
Less Than an Hour Left
Figure It Out
Careful You Don’t Trip
You’re Never Gonna Make It
The Basement? Seriously?
Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock . . .
Four Minutes!
Don’t Die
Halloween, Today
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Harriet
Halloween night, last year
Mark Evans was practically cradling the chain saw. You’d think it was his baby. “I don’t know, Chloe; that doesn’t seem safe.”
“It won’t even have a chain,” Chloe pointed out. “A chain saw can’t hurt anyone if there’s no chain.”
“It’s still heavy. And loud. And what about all that . . . what’s it called? Exhaust? You can inhale it and stuff.”
Chloe closed her eyes for a moment, frustration building inside her. Mark was the biggest guy on the track team. Maybe even the biggest guy in their year. Since when was he such a wuss?
To be fair, she hadn’t chosen him because he was brave or whatever. She’d chosen him because of his shoulders. Mark had the greatest shoulders at Omaha East, all broad and muscular. She figured they’d look seriously sick holding a chain saw, like the guy in that freaky chain saw movie, Jason, or whatever his name was.
“Can’t we just, like, play a recording of chain saw noises?” Mark asked. “Or I could make the noise with my mouth, like this.” He demonstrated how he might make chain saw noises by blowing air through his lips and kind of clicking his tongue.
Chloe was at a loss for words. What were you supposed to say when a guy made chain saw noises at you?
Chloe had known, from the moment she convinced her parents to let her rent out Lacy Farms for her Halloween party, that she wanted scary chain saw guys chasing people through the corn maze. Otherwise it was just a pathetic party in a cornfield. Why could no one else see her vision?
“Mark,” Chloe said very carefully. “Listen to me. You’re going to turn the chain saw on, and you’re going to chase people through the maze, and you’re going to be fucking scary while you do it, or else I’ll have to tell everyone about that thing you do when you kiss.”
Mark had swirled his tongue around in her mouth when they made out at Kylie Mack’s birthday last year, like his tongue was a weird, wet helicopter propeller. It was seriously disgusting.
Mark paled, then swallowed. “Yeah, okay.”
Thank God, Chloe thought as headlights swept through the corn, alerting her to the arrival of her first guests. She loved this part, the beginning-of-the-party part. Absolutely anything could happen now. She checked her phone screen just in time to watch the numbers switch from 6:59 to 7:00.
Showtime.
The genius of her party was this: people had to go through the scary corn maze and get chased by chain saw dudes before they were rewarded with booze and music at the center of the field. Chloe was pretty proud of it. She knew everything was set up, but she still double-checked that the camping lanterns were all lit, that the keg was ready, that the band was getting its gear together. She greeted her first guests, did a shot, and then did a bonus shot (what the hell, it was her party), and that’s when she overheard someone talking about how the corn maze wasn’t even scary, because Mark Evans hadn’t turned his chain saw on; he was just making the chain saw noise by blowing air through his lips.
She felt her jaw clench.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
The sun had fully set by this point, and the only light came from the camping lanterns circling the edges of the clearing behind her, gaslit flames flickering like fireflies. Chloe beelined for the maze but hesitated when she reached the entrance. It was darker than she’d expected it to be, a lot darker than it’d been when she was talking to Mark twenty minutes ago. The entrance was a gaping black mouth. She imagined it snapping closed around her the moment she stepped inside.
She swallowed. “Mark?” she whisper-shouted, taking a single step forward. Fallen cornstalks cracked beneath her feet, and it struck her that the sound was brittle, like bones breaking. She felt a flicker of fear and quickly pushed the thought away. It was the exact same maze she’d been through a million times in the daylight. There was no reason to get all freaked out. She said, louder now, “Mark, get out here.”
No answer.
He was going to make her come find him, wasn’t he? Well, fine, if he wanted to do it that way. She turned a corner, and then another, and then—
There. A figure in the shadows, holding a chain saw.
Chloe exhaled. “I thought we’d agreed you were going to turn the chain saw on,” she said, searching for Mark’s giant arms in the shadows. “If you just make the noises with your mouth, it’s seriously—”
The moon slid out from behind a cloud, its soft silver light glinting off the chain saw’s chain. Chloe stopped talking.
Wait. The chain.
It was old and a little rusty-looking, and even from a few feet away, Chloe could see the jagged metal teeth, so sharp.
That chain definitely wasn’t supposed to be there.
Chloe blinked, twice, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. “What are you—”
The chain saw revved to life, those jagged teeth spinning into a metallic blur. Chloe parted her lips, but she couldn’t scream. Her voice had shriveled up somewhere inside her throat. Her mouth flapped open and closed, wordless, her hands flying up instinctively to
The scream wouldn’t have helped her, anyway. It was much, much too late for that. The chain saw flew closer, whirring and grinding, the sound it made an electric howl—
Until it hit bone.
Three hours earlier
My friends Millie Kido and Xavier “X” O’Hare were staring at me, mouths agape. I never thought I’d have a reason to use the word agape, but it was the only one that fully captured their shock and horror. Not only were their mouths hanging open, but Millie was blinking fast behind her fake glasses, and X’s dark eyebrows had practically disappeared beneath the rim of his red beanie.
It was a little over-the-top, actually. You’d think I’d suggested we spend our evening digging up corpses instead of talking about someone who had.
“Guys, come on, you know I’m right about this,” I tried. “Ed Gein inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even The Silence of the Lambs. He’s iconic.”
“I think you mean that he’s a horrendous monster,” X said. “That’s what you meant to say, right, Alice? Horrendous. Monster.”
He was scratching the back of his neck now, but maybe that was because the shearling in his jacket was bothering him. For as long as I’ve known him, X’s been pretty consistent in his look: jeans, fitted Henley, boots. Recently, though, he’s gotten a little bolder with his fashion choices. Today, that meant the beanie pulled over his black curls and a jean jacket lined with tan-colored fleece so perfectly one shade lighter than his dark brown skin that he must’ve planned it that way. There had to be a guy he wasn’t telling us about.
“Beyoncé is iconic,” Millie added. “Malala is iconic. Ed Gein is just another disturbing white dude.”
I mean, she wasn’t wrong. At Gein’s farmhouse, authorities had found four noses, masks made of human skin, a decapitated head, a lampshade made of skin and bowls made of skulls, lips used as a pull on a window shade, and a belt made from nipples.
It’s not like I wanted to start a fan club.
“If we’re going to do another true-crime podcast, why don’t we use it to highlight stories no one’s heard of?” Millie was saying. Unlike X, she was already in her Halloween costume: Velma, from Scooby-Doo, who she’d loved ever since she saw the old live-action remakes where Velma was portrayed by Hayley Kiyoko, who’s biracial like her. “Like, maybe we could do our first episode on Sam Little? He’s the most prolific serial killer in American history, but a lot of his victims were Black women and prostitutes, so he’s not even half as well-known as Ed Gein.”
“I like that,” X said, pointing at her. “We could use Sam Little as a gateway to talk about the everyday horror of anti-Black violence and racism. Like, how missing Black and brown girls don’t get the same media attention as missing white girls, and we could tie the Black Lives Matter movement to the rise of Black horror films like Candyman, Us . . .”
“Maybe point out the moment at the end of Get Out, when Daniel Kaluuya’s character sees the police lights?” I added.
“Yeah!” X seemed excited for a second, but then, frowning, he added, “Jordan Peele’s films aren’t technically slashers, though.”
We fell silent again. The theme of our podcast was supposed to be the intersection of true crime and horror movies. Preferably slashers, which were our favorites. Millie, X, and I thought we could discuss it in a way that felt intentional and meta, a comment on our culture’s fixation on the deaths of teen girls and complete dismissal of the deaths of BIPOC that also managed to be . . . fun? Could you use the word fun when talking about murder?
Anyway. That had been the plan. But we were finding the intersection of the two topics a little tricky. At the end of the day, horror movies were supposed to be entertaining. No matter how real something might feel when it was happening in a movie, we still had the luxury of closing our eyes, turning away. Real life, not so much.
Millie opened her mouth and then closed it again. She was blinking a lot again, but I think it was because the lenses in her fake glasses were a little smudged. X, who wore real wire-frame glasses every day, seemed to take offense to the fake ones and said, “Millie, if they’re hurting your eyes, just take them off.”
“Then no one will know who I’m supposed to be.”
“You’re dressed head-to-toe in orange. They’ll know.”
We were in the school’s podcasting studio. The words podcasting studio probably made you think we were fancy, like maybe we were at one of those rich-kid schools where every student gets an iPad instead of textbooks and the cafeteria sells brand-name junk food—but Omaha East wasn’t like that. The podcasting studio was just a room in the basement with carpet stapled to the walls as soundproofing and a couple extra power strips where you could plug in phones and mics. It was pretty crappy.
My phone started playing the Halloween theme, which meant I had a text. I glanced at the screen.
are y’all done with your creepy murder club yet??
It was from Eli, my best friend since kindergarten. Most people didn’t really get my friendship with Eli, considering a) he was the only person in my life who wasn’t a complete true-crime/slasher-film fanatic, and b) 99 percent of our interactions happened in the form of text messages.
All I can say about that is the world is divided between the people who defended you against that asshat Kyle Stahlicker when he said your hair made you look like a deranged clown in the third grade and the people who didn’t. The people in the first group are your ride or die. Eli wasn’t just my best friend; he was my brother.
5 more minutes, I wrote back.
His response came approximately .025 seconds after I hit send: whatever, I’m out. GBBO isn’t gonna watch itself.
GBBO = The Great British Bake Off. Eli refused to use the Americanized name out of loyalty to Mary Berry. I shoved my phone back in my pocket.
“I couldn’t even finish Texas Chainsaw,” Millie was saying.
“It was pretty disgusting,” X added, but he sounded more impressed than disgusted. He was writing his own slasher, one starring a few Black people, and we all thought he was going to do for slashers what Jordan Peele had done for Black horror at large. One of the reasons he wanted to start this podcast was to start making inroads with Black horror fans so that when he came out with his first film, he had a ready-made audience. X was brilliant like that.
“The thing with the girl on the meat hook . . .” Millie shuddered.
“Totally gross,” X agreed, smiling now. “Totally.”
“It’s too bad Sally Hardesty was such a crap Final Girl,” I added, and Millie shuddered again, probably still thinking about the meat hook. Unlike X and me, she wasn’t a horror-movie superfan. She tolerated them, and she really liked some of the quieter, more suspenseful Japanese horror films, like Dark Water, but all in all, horror wasn’t her genre. She was here because of the criminal-justice angle. Serial had been her gateway drug into the world of true crime, and from there it was an easy path to My Favorite Murder and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. But it wasn’t the stories about death and murder that got her interested; it was the injustice. Millie wanted to save the world, one wrongfully incarcerated person at a time.
I had this theory that you could understand people better by figuring out the movie genre everyone would star in. Take Millie, for instance. When she wasn’t dressed as Velma, she was mostly in overalls (the legs rolled up, like, five times, on account of how short she was) and her favorite purple Doc Martens, her wavy, dark brown hair pulled back in a bun or a braid, the epitome of effortless cool. She’d be amazing in a ’90s-era Julia Roberts–esque thriller where she worked tirelessly to uncover some insane conspiracy. If I ever found myself entangled in a secret government plot, Millie would be my first call.
“Did you know Chloe Bree’s doing a Texas Chainsaw–themed party this year?” X asked.
“Is she?” I said, uninterested. X, Millie, and I weren’t exactly “party” people. We spent every Halloween watching horror movies and devouring the amazingness that was pumpkin-spice ice cream with broken-up Halloween candy on top. I mean, we were spending our Friday afternoon in the school basement; do I really need to elaborate on how we weren’t exactly the cool kids?
“She rented out the corn maze at Lacy Farms,” Millie added. “Our whole grade’s going to be there.”
