If there’s one piece of advice you need to survive a YA horror novel, it’s this: Stay home on prom night. Stephen King can probably be credited with kicking off the trope of blood-soaked proms in his 1974 debut novel Carrie, which famously ends with a massacre when a gory prom prank drives a bullied teenager to unleash her psychic powers upon her classmates and the surrounding town. In The Weight of Blood, which came out back in November, Tiffany D. Jackson takes the bones of Stephen King’s Carrie and reimagines the story for the twenty-first century, updating its themes for a modern audience.
Maddison “Mad, Mad, Maddy” Washington has been regarded as a weird outcast ever since an unnatural incident involving a crazed swarm of birds first alerted the town of Springville to her existence when she was twelve years old. Now a high school senior, she tries to keep her head down and prevent her classmates from discovering her secret: she’s been passing for white in this small Georgia Georgia town, where the racial divisions feel more like something out of the 1950s than 2014. But when a surprise rainshower causes her hair—which her overbearing father meticulously straightens—to revert to its natural texture, her biracial heritage is revealed. A video of her classmates’ racist bullying goes viral and suddenly the school is under national scrutiny for its backward social mores. In a bid to salvage their community’s reputation (as well as to assuage her own feelings of guilt), popular and high-achieving Wendy decides to organize the school’s first racially integrated prom and convinces her Black football star boyfriend, Kendrick, to take Maddy to the dance. But not all the white kids at Springville are ready for this kind of change, and a racist prank on prom night sets off a chain of events that leaves half the town burned to the ground and most of the senior class dead. Interspersed throughout the narrative are news articles and snippets of books and podcasts that look back on the events of that prom night and try to make sense of the enigma that is Maddy Washington.
Some might think it’s rather ambitious—perhaps even presumptuous—for a younger writer to take on a classic work by Stephen King. But The Weight of Blood works so well not because it’s trying to improve upon a master of the genre but because it uses an old, familiar story to explore difficult modern issues. One major theme of both novels is bullying. But whereas Carrie was bullied simply for her strange way of dressing and ignorant upbringing, the bullying that Maddy faces has an additional edge of racism. The high school that Maddy attends was likely inspired at least in part by news stories of a real Georgia school that made headlines with its first ever integrated prom in 2014. Racism is alive and well in the United States to an extent that white society is often uncomfortable with admitting. The character of Maddy’s principle bully, Jules, is all too familiar in the way she acts as though being accused of racism is far more egregious than any of her racist actions. And while the other white characters range from being overtly racist to engaging in unintentional microaggressions or white saviorism, the cumulative effect weighs heavily on the Black and biracial inhabitants of Springville, as it does for many BIPOC in today’s society. The Weight of Blood also tackles more specific and nuanced topics such as police brutality, colorism even within Black community, and the trade offs of assimilating into the dominant culture, which modern readers will be able to relate to.
Another challenge of retelling a well-known story is that everyone already knows the ending. But The Weight of Blood handles this cleverly by leaning into it. The novel opens with the testimony of a local parent recounting her experience of the infamous prom night, when her son stumbled home dazed and covered in blood, one of the few survivors of the senior class. Throughout the story, additional documents and podcast episodes continue to add tension to the narrative by contributing only small fragments of chaos, death, and destruction, building up to the bigger picture of exactly what happened on prom night. Even the book’s cover and the title alone serve to bring to mind the bloody prank at the end of Carrie, but the exact details of this book’s prank and the events that follow—especially the ways in which they differ from King’s novel—aren’t revealed until near the end. Tiffany D. Jackson does an impressive job of still managing to build up suspense and horror in a familiar story.
If you love some smart social criticism and clever narrative devices in your horror novels, you don’t want to miss The Weight of Blood. You can find the book on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!