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"Final Girls and Leading Ladies aren’t born. They’re made. They’re a culmination of their choices.

And in the end I chose to be both."

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TLDR: Scream meets Hinge: Jamie walks into a speed-dating event looking for a match and finds a murderer instead. The premise? Absolutely killer. The pacing? Had me reading until 4AM. The execution? More “Final Girl in theory” than “Final Girl in practice.” The characters are cardboard, the mystery is easy to crack, and the finale pulls its punch. Add a dash of BookTok romance and you get a bloody, chaotic popcorn slasher where the chemistry is mostly “he’s hot and he might stab me.” Fun Friday-night VHS energy—just not one that’ll haunt me after the credits roll.

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Trigger Warnings at the end if anyone needs them!

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Contents

1). First impressions 2). Where it shines 3). Where it falters 4). Genre check: Horror + Romance = Horrance? Romorror? 5). The verdict 6). Is this book for you? 7). Trigger Warnings

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1) First Impressions

This is Thompson's debut novel. She's an Australian author and educator, and per her Goodreads bio she writes "women with soft hearts and strong wills" and puts them in the "deepest of trouble". Hmm…

Full disclosure: I picked this up because of the title, not the cover, the title. I saw it on one of those "most popular romance/romantasy of the year so far" lists, and it's obviously a play on How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. I only skimmed the description before buying, "instant national bestseller, humorous, terrifying slasher rom-com", so I went in thinking this would be romance-first with a murder subplot underneath. That's on me for not reading closer, but I'm not mad at it. Pleasant surprise. (:

The premise: a group of singles enters a speed dating event hoping to find love. Instead, the lights go out, the doors lock, and the night turns into a murder mystery. Jamie, a horror-obsessed PhD candidate, has to figure out who's her match and who's the killer.

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2) Where It Shines

The title and the cover are what hooked me, and I stand by that. I saw both cover versions: the more known one with the clock and the bloody hand, and the more vintage one, which has a woman grabbing pearls, blood, an open-chested man, a martini glass, roses. That second cover specifically is fantastic. It takes 80s/90s slasher imagery and drops it into a romance color palette, and it just works. I did not study graphic design, but I really love it and this book cover is it.

The pacing is genuinely the best thing about this book. I started reading around 10pm and didn't stop until 3 or 4am. I only put it down because I physically had to sleep. I don't know what happened, but at one point I was in chapter 3 and then suddenly I was in chapter 30-something. If you're in a reading slump like I was/am, this is exactly the kind of book that pulls you out of it.

I loved the horror and rom-com references, as someone who's actually seen most of the (horror) movies Jamie mentions. She's constantly bringing up Scream, Halloween, Friday the 13th, final girl tropes, cabin-in-the-woods stuff, and on top of that, every chapter opens with a rom-com reference twisted into something murderous. So you've got horror references woven through the plot and rom-com references framing every chapter. If you're a horror fan, that layer is genuinely fun!

My favorite character, by far, was Laurie, Jamie's best friend. She's got Catwoman-2004 energy, she has her own personality outside of Jamie, she doesn't disappear after chapter one, she actually contributes. If I had to pick a favorite scene, it'd be the opening chapter, where Jamie and her are talking. Honestly, if the author ever considers publishing the article of the intersection of slaher and rom-com’s in the first chapter, I would 100% read it.

“[…] the textbook endings within each genre align with consecutive stages of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: slashers—safety and security; rom-coms—love and belonging (see appendix 2). Put simply, these films give us something we all inherently want: a life to live and a reason to live it.”

The atmosphere works too — the blackout, the locked building, not knowing who the killer is. That part of the slasher formula, the paranoia, the harvest section where people start dying, I genuinely enjoyed.

And the concept itself, with horror taking the lead and romance woven in rather than the other way around, is something I hadn’t really seen done quite like this before. Horror + romance = Horrance? Romorror? What are we even calling this genre? Either way, I love the idea (so so much !!!) respect the ambition and the swing, even if I don’t think it fully lands, which I’ll get into later.

The audiobook, for what it's worth, is decent. The women narrator is solid, and there are some light sound effects that I appreciated. The male narrator I had some trouble with. I normally listen at 2-3x speed and I had to drop this down to 1.45x just to understand what he was saying.

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3) Where It Falters

I sadly didn't find it funny. ): Maybe that makes me an annoying, humorless person, I don't know, but the banter just did not land for me. It's very millennial-girlboss, very "I cannot function without my coffee," very "I'm just a girl," very self-aware-in-a-way-that-isn't-actually-clever. The sarcasm doesn't read as sarcasm to me. It's trying too hard to be quirky and relatable that it ends up being cringy.

And I have to talk about the Taylor Swift of it all, because it's bad. I actually went back and counted… her full name, Taylor Swift, gets mentioned 9 times. Just "Taylor" on its own, 11 times. And that's not even counting how many times her lyrics or her music get referenced. It's like glitter, you touch it once and suddenly it's everywhere, in your kitchen, in your blanket, and you can't get rid of it. That's this book with Taylor Swift references. It stressed me out. Please, please stop.

It's also incredibly predictable. I called the killer, the twists, the romantic outcomes — almost all of it, correctly, well before the book confirmed any of it. Nothing about the mystery surprised me.

The characters are cardboard cutouts, and I mean that literally — they function as slasher archetypes and never really get past that. I know slashers run on archetypes, that's normal for the genre, but a book has so much more room than a 90-minute movie to actually build these people out, and this one doesn't use it. Instead the book tells you to care about these people rather than making you care. It’s tell-don't-show with the relationships specifically, and their "emotional arcs" feel forced and blatantly spelled out rather than earned. I didn't feel anything when people died. The side characters are disposable. I genuinely think the book made me care more about Taylor Swift, who I don't even like, than about half the characters who got killed off. I also didn't feel much for the actual love interest himself — he never became someone I was invested in.

The romance is lust, not connection. To me romance needs emotional depth, not just people being attracted to each other, and this book is 100% the latter; it's instalust dressed up as romance. The love triangle adds nothing, feels unnecessary start to finish, and the twist involving it lands so badly it could've been cut entirely without losing anything.

Jamie herself leans into the quirky-girl-protagonist trope pretty hard. Capital-S Sarcasm, quirky unusual interests, chaotic thoughts, “I’m so short uwu”, constant pop culture references. I can relate to the horror-fan part of that, but overall she read as annoying and a cringe to me. I've seen other readers who love her voice, so this might genuinely be a love-her-or-she-grates-on-you situation, and I just landed on the wrong side of it.

The "girlboss,”, “girl math”, white-liberal-capitalistic-feminist revenge angle the book gestures at feels shallow rather than actually critical of anything. And some of the characters' reactions to murder, the word itself, the fact of it happening around them, feel weird and unrealistic in the moment.

Finally, the final showdown is bland, and this is the part that bugs so hard, because the book actually nails the slasher formula right up until the climax. The harvest, the body count section — that's where the real tension lives. The actual final girl showdown, the false victory, the final scare, the open ending — it's there structurally, but it lands so flat. There was more suspense during the murders than during the moment the entire book was building toward, and the ending goes for an "oh my god, really?" gut-punch that just isn't satisfying.

All that said, this is a debut novel. The execution has real problems, yes, but I do see potential here. (:

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4) Genre Check: Horror + Romance = Horrance? Romorror?

I also want to be clear about this, because the marketing and the title misled me the way it'll probably mislead other people too: this is a slasher first, with romance woven in. Not a romance with a murder subplot.

The book runs the classic slasher formula pretty faithfully: the inciting incident, arrival and isolation, the harvest or body count, and then the final showdown. The harvest section is honestly where the book is strongest; real suspense, real paranoia. It's the character work and the final confrontation that let the formula down.

If I had to comp it:

Scream + My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones + Ali Hazelwood-flavored horniness, + Scream Queens - the actual emotional intimacy any of those deliver = How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates

I think this works better as a gateway book than as a fully realized entry in either genre: a good on-ramp if you're a horror fan wanting to dip into romance, or a romance reader wanting to try horror. If you want either genre done at full strength, this maybe isn't it.

It's around 400 pages. I've seen people say it should've been cut to 150, and I just don't think that's realistic for a slasher-plus-romance book to actually function. I don't think length was the issue here.

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5) The Verdict

It was entertaining. That's really the headline. Would I say it's the best book out there? Not at all. But it's fast, it's addictive, it knows exactly what it is, and it doesn't pretend to be something smarter than it is.

The premise — two genres that don't usually get mashed together, dropped into a speed-dating lockdown — is genuinely the best part of this book.

The execution just doesn't keep up: predictable mystery, thin characters, comedy that didn't work for me, way too much Taylor Swift, and a climax that undersells everything the middle of the book built up.

I wouldn't call this smart, scary, or romantic by my own definition of romance. But it's the kind of book you reach for during a reading slump, or a weekend where you don't want your brain to work too hard.

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6) Is This Book For You?

Read this if you want:

♡ A fast-paced slasher-first story with a locked-room mystery ♡ Heavy horror movie references (Scream, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and more) ♡ A one-sitting, reading-slump-recovery type of read ♡ A gateway book between horror and romance, in either direction ♡ Campy, self-aware horror that doesn't take itself seriously ♡ A fun, low-effort read for a weekend or trip

Skip this if you need:

♡ Deep, emotionally grounded characters ♡ An unpredictable mystery ♡ Nightmare fuel type of horror ♡ Romance built on emotional connection rather than attraction ♡ Genuinely witty or sharp comedic writing ♡ A satisfying, high-tension climax ♡ Minimal pop-culture/meme-era humor

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7) Trigger Warnings

This book contains depictions and themes of:

♡ Graphic violence and murder ♡ Gore ♡ Stalking and captivity (locked-venue/lockdown scenario) ♡ Death of multiple named characters ♡ Sexual content ♡ Themes of paranoia and psychological tension