set in a post spiritualism all-girls christian school, it makes the perfect stage for pure terror, as there's something awfully..slow about the uptake in this book, not plot wise, in fact as a reader you're incredibly engaged and fully in this small suffocating corner of rot just as the girls are, but it's the horror that's slow, the term i'd use is insidious. You can feel it crawling under your skin, haunting, making you question everything. The "ghost" or "entity" is so invisible you can't even tell who or what it is, and i found that to be TERRIFYING! i was just as anxious as they were, and the ending only left me with more questions, despite being a few implications into what "it" was, and the wonder if it was just them after all, for being queer and thus god punishing them. Now onto the characters: Starting with our "queen bee", the precious perfect blonde girl that haunts the narrative, who somewhat reminded me of laura paulmer in twin peaks and jackie from yellowjackets, the author is incredibly talented at hinting the layers behind the characters groundwork, at them being more than what they seem. I also found Emily, to be a really interesting main character, it's fascinating to see the events from the perspective of a unlikeable deeply repressed, queer, lonely young woman, who, like the rest of them happen to feel the weight of the world on their shoulders all at once. One of my pet peeves in books, is women and girls written stereotypically, like caricatures and often include the author's own subconscious bias on them, but the girls here are written as increbly human, flawed, full of contradictions, hopes, desires, rage and resentment. i also found the tension throughout the book, between certain characters to be incredible and satisfying, realistic and imperfect. A great ghost story, but also a story about our very human monstrosities, and what it looks like when we feed them.