It’s been four years since the Witch Lake Slayings and Jennifer Daniels has returned to Proofrock, Idaho. Unfortunately for Jennifer and the rest of the town’s inhabitants, death isn’t done with them yet. In the opening pages of Don’t Fear the Reaper, by the masterful Stephen Graham Jones, we meet another killer who decides to make Proofrock his hunting ground. Jennifer and co-final girl, Letha Mondragon, are once again called on to slay the monster and save the town.
When we first met her, in My Heart is a Chainsaw, Jennifer called herself Jade. She had a well-deserved reputation as a horror expert and a less well-deserved one for being the town weirdo. By contrast, Letha was the golden daughter of a man rich enough to buy anything and everything. Four years later, after the massacre at Proofrock’s Indian Lake, Jennifer is on parole after beating a murder rap and Letha is a young mother fighting against addiction to pain pilled, prescribed to help her get through the process of rebuilding her destroyed lower jaw. But where Jennifer has tried to leave her past behind, Letha has used the intervening time to become as much of an expert on the horror genre as Jennifer was.
Neither of the two women has much time to do anything more than briefly reacquaint themselves before Dark Mill South arrives in Proofrock, on the heels of a whiteout blizzard that covered his escape from federal custody. Those early pages do short work of establishing what a monster South is. Law enforcement can only speculate on his motivations, if indeed South has any motives. He seems to be driven only by the desire to kill as many people as creatively as possible before he is either recaptured or killed. Almost as soon as Letha and Jennifer meet again, Letha’s deputy husband is informed that people are already being violently killed by, presumably, an escaped Dark Mill South.
Don’t Fear the Reaper is relentlessly gory. Jennifer and Letha race from crime scene to crime scene before they have their own encounters with South in a kind of running battle across Proofrock, Indian Lake, and the ruins of the Terra Nova subdivision. While Letha and Jennifer (before she reclaims her identity as badass Jade) wonder why Proofrock is such a magnet for inexplicable death, they impressively find the will and strength to face both South and the lethal cold of an Idaho winter. I’ll admit that, more than once, I wondered if one of them would die. Graham Jones doesn’t spare his characters and I’d say there was a decent chance that there would be only one final girl at the end of the bloodbath. I won’t spoil the ending by saying one way or the other.
I have a theory about why such terrible things happen in Proofrock but I want to wait until the third book in the trilogy comes out. I need more information to confirm my suspicions. Also, I don’t want to look like an idiot if I turn out to be wrong.