Keep Your Enemies Close

 

TITLE: Kill Creatures

AUTHOR: Rory Power

PUBLISHER: Scholastic

PUBLISHING DATE: June 5, 2025

PAGES: 281   

SOURCE: ARC

FROM GOODREADS: Last summer, Nan's three best friends disappeared into Saltcedar Canyon. 

She's spent the year since grieving their loss and avoiding questions about what happened that night. Now, on the anniversary, she's ready to say goodbye, and so are the girls' families, who have reconvened to hold a memorial. But their vigil is interrupted by the shocking return of one of the missing girls alive. Everybody is overjoyed. Everybody, that is, except Nan, who was pretty sure they were dead. 

After all, she's the one who killed them.

MY THOUGHTS: I read this book right before my vacation and it was the perfect shorter read needed to kick off what turned out to be a great reading vacation.

When the book opens, the main character Nan, is attending a memorial in her small town of Saltcedar Canyon.  A year ago, she and her three best friends snuck out for a night of fun, but she is the only one who returned.  Obviously still reeling from her grief, Nan doesn't know how she will make it through the ceremony.  After all, the bodies were never found so the girls' parents are trying to keep hope arrive.  However, everyone is in for a shock because in the middle of the memorial one of the girls surfaces and surprising to everyone, she is still alive.  This is especially surprising to Nan, because only she knows she killed all three on that fateful night.

I originally wanted to read Kill Creatures because it was marketed as a horror story.  I didn't really find it as such, but it was full of horrific events and even more horrific people.  In fact, I'm pretty sure there wasn't one person in the book I liked, but boy, I loved every minute I spent disliking them. Since so much is revealed up front, this book basically works with a dual timeframe.  While Nan and the town is trying to put together what happened to Luce, the girl who has returned, the reader is also seeing what events led up to that fateful night. Even though this is a YA book, I have to admit there were a few shocks I didn't see coming.

If you like unreliable narrators and don't mind deep topics (although there is a huge list if trigger warnings I ignored at the very beginning), this might be the book for you.  It's the first one I've read by this author even though I've had some others on my TBR for some time.

MY RATING: 4 PAWS