Note: I am aware that my entry for
February was just last week. However, at the time I was in the midst of reading
this book as well and had I not finished Wilder first,
this book would certainly have been listed. As you’ll see the book I’m about to
review lists many of the larger themes that have been part of many of previous
reviews – and does have a love story at its center. So for that reason, I’m
breaking my own rule.
Throughout my
reading of The Last Girls Standing, I couldn’t help but think that Sloan
Allison, the protagonist at the center of the story, might have been best
served in she had been able to avail herself of the services of Mulder and
Scully. After all, the overarching action involves the ritualistic slaughter of
eight people by a cult that considers themselves eco-terrorists and commits
suicide after their crimes. This is the kind of thing the FBI investigates and
has elements that are pertinent to the X-Files.
I can see that
if Sloan went to see them, Scully would be all too aware - because it’s obvious to everyone in the
book – that Sloan is understandably suffering from massive amounts of both PTSD
and survivor’s guilt and that this kind of trauma can lead to the paranoid
beliefs she has almost from the start. Mulder would naturally suspect this as
well, but he would do her the courtesy of a further investigation before
telling her that there are no connections.
If Sloan went
out of her way to point out the ‘connections’ she sees, Mulder and Scully would
no doubt be gentle and tell them that some of the scariest cases they ever
investigated seemed to involve paranoid conspiracies but at their cores
involved just ordinary people. Scully would tell them how she had been certain
that an ordinary death fetishist appeared to her as a monster when he was just
an ordinary man. Mulder would tell her how he can be called in by his former
profiler to tell them that there was a possible a supernatural being was
committed murders when in fact his old mentor had spent so much time in the
killer’s head that he could not get out of it and became a killer himself.
Scully (not Mulder) would tell her that she once went on a date with a man who
believed his tattoo was telling him to kill people when in fact it was just his
built in psychosis. And both would say that there are things that go bump in
the night out there, but in this case the people who killed eight counselors
and left only Sloan and Cherry alive were just crazy people who had lost their
way. They would conclude by telling Sloan the best thing she could do for
herself was find a way to move forward and try to get help from the people who
loved her and supported her.
If you look at
the cover and book jacket of Last Girls Standing, you would assume that
what you are about to get is some kind of horror novel. Sloan and Cherry have
been bonded by their trauma and that Sloan is learning that there is a chance
the teenage girl she had fallen in love with is part of the cult that killed
her. I don’t know if Jennifer Dugan, who is a writer of lesbian love stories,
made this decision deliberately or whether it was a decision of her publisher
to lead the reader to think that’s what we were getting. It’s certainly what I
assumed when I began to read this novel. But as it unfolded, I realized that
Dugan was doing a trick that The X-Files sometimes did to great power –
have a story with the atmosphere of supernatural trappings with a great
conspiracy to reveal at the center something more banal and painfully,
ridiculously simple. The result is a story that is more frightening than any
conspiracy theory could ever be because it is one of the stories I’ve ever read
of a descent into madness.
When the novel
begins it has been months since the tragedy but Sloan is still there. Her
parents (mostly her mother) have spent an infinite amount of time and patience
trying to get their daughter to find a way to move forward. Sloan has refused.
She has not agreed to go to any kind of therapy that has been suggested to her.
She has only agreed to see someone who isn’t a therapist but rather part
of regression hypnosis. She has stopped seeing all of her friends from before
the killings. She has ‘deferred’ going to NYU for one year, but as we see in a
sad scene halfway through the novel Sloan clearly has no intention of ever
going to college. She hasn’t tried to get a job. She barely interacts with her
parents. The only person she has any relationship with at all is Cherry, the
other survivor of the massacre.
No one is happy
with the relationship. Sloan’s parents believe that it is holding her back from
moving forward with her life. They’re right, to be clear. What they don’t get is
that is a toxic and one-sided relationship – for Cherry. Sloan has not been
able to remember what happened to her after a certain point in the massacre but
Cherry has. Sloan has been making Cherry tell her this story over and over. Most
of their interactions when we meet them in the novel involve Cherry picking Sloan
up from therapy which is the only part of the session Sloan looks forward to.
They have spent weeks and months googling the crime and putting it on the wall
of Cherry’s room as part of a collage. The two of them treat it as a game which
at the end they get to make out. Cherry has also been doing a lot of things to
help Sloan – she has been making flower arrangements for all the funerals they’ve
gone too, she made a story up about one of the counselors to make him the hero,
even though it’s clearly something that bothered her. Sloan has been sleeping
at Cherry’s house because it’s the only time she can sleep at all. As the novel
progresses, it’s increasingly clear how much wear this has been putting on
Cherry, but she is doing this because she loves Sloan and wants to help her.
The problem is
that Sloan has gotten to the point that she doesn’t want help, not really.
There are numerous occasions throughout the novel that Sloan makes it clear she
wished she had been killed to, which is sad but not uncommon. The old Sloan
Allison effectively was killed along with everyone who actually got murdered,
something she’s willing to acknowledge. The problem is there is no sign that
Sloan has any interest in trying to move forward. She has fixated on the idea
of the missing time because she thinks that if she remembers what happened to
her, she can move on. But as the novel progresses, it increasingly becomes
clear that’s just an excuse to stop her from doing anything to get better.
In the scenes
with Sloan’s mother, Sloan sees how much damage she has done basically wearing
her down to a nub. By this point only one of her friends from ‘before’ is still
reaching out to her because she’s been shutting them out. Sloan has no interest
in any part of her old life. She only cares about Cherry and that is clearly
because of her connection to what happened. When Cherry increasingly tries to
get her to move forward, and when she begins to take steps to get past the
horrors, Sloan takes this as a betrayal even though there is never a moment in
the entire novel where Cherry is anything but supportive of Sloan.
And the thing is
Sloan knows it, but she doesn’t have the capacity to move forward. So she does
what far too many people do in the aftermath of a tragedy: they go down a
rabbit hole. In this case, it’s more literal. Sloan finds a box in Cherry’s
home that has a rabbit carved on it. Cherry doesn’t want to share it with her.
This starts a splinter in Sloan’s mind. When the lone survivor of the murders –
“The Fox’ as they have nicknamed him – takes a plea, his sister reaches out.
Sloan is convinced that she knows something about what happened. Cherry tells
her nothing good can come from this. Under the guise of reconnecting Sloane
convinces one of her friend Connor to drive her to an out of the way meeting
place, something he clearly does not want to do.
Sloan meets with
this woman who tells her about her younger brother and how he got involved with
the group that called itself Morte Hominus and a man named Marco. It’s clear
that his sister doesn’t believe any part of their rituals and thinks they were
lunatics. But when Sloan learns that the leader of the cult called himself The Rabbit,
Sloan goes catatonic and is now convinced that Cherry’s mother is part of the
cult. Connor is horrified by her reaction – and even more horrified when she
tells him that even if Cherry is part of the cult, that isn’t a reason to end
the relationship.
Sloan begins to
read a book which is Morte Hominus’ Bible. The moment she sees the first page she
passes out. Cherry tries to convince her to leave the book alone and she agrees
– but then notices pages are torn out.
By this point
in the book Sloan is almost certainly beyond help. The final straw comes when
Sloan learns that ‘The Fox’ has been reaching out to the survivors’, something
everyone has gone out of their way to avoid mentioning to her. Sloan wants to
accept his invitation. Not for closure or any kind of therapy. She wants to
know if Cherry was part of the cult and she was left alive for a reason. When
you are so far gone that you think that the person who killed eight people and
utterly destroyed your life has anything constructive to say to you, there
may be no way back.
As the novel
continues Sloan’s mind has clearly fractured to the point that even when
reality violates the narrative she has built for herself, she keeps trying to
twist it to mean something that isn’t. She keeps acknowledging even to herself
how gossamer thin the strands she’s weaving are for this conspiracy. The thing
is, the longer the novel goes on, it’s clear that Sloan just can’t do it:
“She would come
to terms with the fact she wasn’t special…That she survived a mass murder
because of a random roll of the dice. That it could just have easily been (one
of the other counselors sitting her with Cherry.”
But each time
she refuses to turn away. Sloan is constantly being offered help throughout the
novel. The last time her therapist sees her she tells her: “I can only help you
if you want to be helped?” When Sloan says she does, the therapist asks: “Are
you sure about that?” And by this point we know she doesn’t.
In the final
act of the novel, Sloan is alone in her home going to see the Fox. Her mother
is working early and staying late. Her father is constantly taking their
brother to see friends.
“Sloan
understood what they were really doing.
They were
running. Running away from the monster in their house, the memory of what was
lost. The shell of what remained. They ran from Sloan…and now Cherry was running
too.
It was fine,
Sloane thought, it was fine.”
The prison the
Fox is being held in is in the town where the camp where the murders took place
in. We understand going in just how horrible this must be for Cherry and how
much she must love Sloan to be willing to do this for her. When they arrive at
the prison, Cherry is clearly horrified just being there and Sloan is so
detached she almost thinks of it as ‘disappointing’
I won’t reveal
the ending of the novel, though at this point you might well be able to figure
it out for yourself given Sloane’s degeneration to this point. There are
certain elements that do fit the model of the horror film but the only monster
still around is the one that made herself. In perhaps the most twisted way
imaginable, you might even consider the final pages a happy ending. I have
little doubt Sloan does.
The ending its
worth noting would not be out of place on an episode of The X-Files – or
Criminal Minds or Law and Order or any of so many procedurals we’ve
become familiar with over the years. That said I am reminded of the conclusion
of so many episodes of The X-Files over the years: the final bloody
conclusion of a case and either Mulder or Scully in a detached fashion,
narrating their final case notes to the viewer. They would be able to make
sense out of what happened at the end of The Last Girls Standing far
more than a liver-eating mutant or a giant bloodsucking worm or an alien conspiracy.
Because we’ve met people like Sloane Allison before, even if they haven’t
survived a trauma like this. We run into people who get lost in the dark and thinks
that the people with flashlights are just their to lead them even deeper.
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