Melissa Albert: "The Bad Ones"

Title: The Bad Ones [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Melissa Albert [Instagram | Goodreads]
Genres: Supernatural, Thriller/Mystery, Contemporary
Year: 2024
Age: 14+
Stars: 4.5/5
Pros: Engrossing, twisty mystery. Unexpected resolution. Fleshed-out leads whose relationship is equally well-developed.
Cons: A certain player's involvement becomes clear a bit too early. The supporting characters are little more than tools to advance the plot. The romance feels unnecessary.  
WARNING! Sexual assault/abuse (off-page), self-injury, car accident, parental death (off-page), murder by suffocation, near-drowning. Homophobia, bigotry, bullying.
Will appeal to: Those who like urban legends/supernatural mysteries/witchcraft gone wrong. Those who enjoy fierce, yet messy/toxic friendships.

Blurb: In the course of a single winter’s night, four people vanish without a trace across a small town. Nora’s estranged best friend, Becca, is one of the lost. As Nora tries to untangle the truth of Becca’s disappearance, she discovers a darkness in her town’s past, as well as a string of coded messages Becca left for her to unravel. These clues lead Nora to a piece of local lore: a legendary goddess of forgotten origins who played a role in Nora and Becca’s own childhood games... (Amazon)

Review: I'm late to the Melissa Albert party, but after loving her adult debut, I've made it my mission to read everything she writes. I have some small quibbles about The Bad Ones, but regardless, I found it to be trippy, entertaining and emotional, and I loved its curveball ending.
Just a heads-up before I start...the cover doesn't match the content. There's a weeping angel statue at some point in the story, but don't expect it to mean anything...and if the cover is supposed to represent the goddess (which of course it is), BIG FAIL.

DAZED AND AMAZED

The Bad Ones blends all-consuming (you might very well say toxic) friendship with a supernatural mystery that leaves you enough breadcrumbs to figure out its direction, yet throws you for a loop multiple times before you decipher it, and hits you with a last couple of twists you couldn't have seen coming. Told in three different voices and timelines (Nora's 1st person POV in the present, Becca's 3rd person POV in the past, another character's 3rd person POV recounting even older events), it's an addictive puzzle with minimal gore or violence, but a dark core - though it ultimately ends up in a much healthier place than one might expect. The beginning is atmospheric, intriguing, creepy - unexpected, too. Albert doesn't waste time setting up the mystery, but she doesn't start, as one would anticipate, by introducing her main characters - yet the hook is impossible to resist: three people, apparently unrelated, are accosted by a mysterious female being and vanish into thin air. From there, the wheels in the reader's head keep turning and the theories about what happened to those three (and to Becca herself, later reported missing as well) multiply. I buddy-read this one with my friend Carrie, and we traded a few wild hypotheses along the way, but most of them turned out to be wrong...though at least one of the answers had stared us in the face the whole time 😅. And, considering we're both seasoned supernatural-thriller readers, that's saying something. The final twist had me in awe, especially since it took one of my core assumptions about the plot and flipped it on its head, giving the story a far more original - and tragic - angle (Carrie was a bit less enthused by that turn of events, but I'll let her review speak for itself). [...]

GAMES GIRLS PLAY

I have to say that I've read a lot of YA supernatural horror lately, but though the horror part was appropriately gruesome and satisfying, I've almost always ended those books wanting more from the rest...maybe not the worldbuilding, but the characters, the writing. Not so with this one* - despite the usual purple metaphors here and there, the writing is evocative yet sharp; the main characters have a lot of depth, and their relationship rings true on so many levels. Nora and Becca's bond walks a fine line between passionate and unhealthy (as many teen friendships, especially female ones, are wont to do) until it goes straight-up toxic, but Albert gives it enough nuance to make the reader sympathetic to both her characters. Becca is obsessed by the goddess (real or made-up, we'll only find out later), since her life offers her little to no safety, after her parents died and she was left in the care of a stepmom who doesn't love her. But she wants Nora to be part of that obsession, and at the same time she wants to protect her (especially since Nora doesn't really believe), and it's a mess. Frankly, when we finally learn why their relationship fractured, it's hard to take a side. And despite that fracture, their bond proves to be a force to be reckoned with...

*You might argue that TBO isn't your average horror book because there's hardly any gore, but as I mentioned above, it's dark nevertheless...

SLIGHTLY SORE SPOTS

There are a few things that I didn't love about this novel, to be honest. First off, one of the major questions gets an obvious, if not spelled-out, answer (because there was pretty much only one candidate for a certain role) during the third quarter of the story, which is a bit too soon if you ask me (I understand that it was hard to avoid that particular early reveal, but still...). Secondly, the supporting characters are only there for the plot, basically - I'm particularly salty about Nora's sister Cat only manifesting for a pep talk and disappearing again immediately after, so much that Nora would come across as an only child if it weren't for a couple of mentions of Cat and that one scene between them. Lastly, we could have done without the mandatory love interest, who's more present than Nora's sister, but doesn't carry much weight to begin with (plus there's a scene with him that felt inappropriate to me, though - like my friend above noted - it doesn't have a sexual connotation). But the story as a whole was such a wild and emotional ride that those things didn't impact my enjoyment too much. On a final note...there are not one, but two Doctor Who references in the book, and of course that pleased my Whovian heart to no end 😂. But really, I'm not biased. This is the kind of story that even adults who aren't too fond of YA can read (take Tammy's word for it)...so go ahead and experience it for yourself.

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