TL;DR: A slasher built on a Hardy skeleton and fueled by female rage that has somewhere specific to go. Randolph’s prose is clean, her characters bleed before they die, and she sticks the ending in a way most debut novelists don’t dare to try. The setup sags. The payoff doesn’t.

Mikayla Randolph read Tess of the D’Urbervilles and got mad enough to write a slasher about it. Not allegorically. The whole apparatus sits right there on the page in coveralls and a bident, at a cabin in the Sierras, in 2026. Randolph told an interviewer she wrote the first draft on a laptop while traveling through New Zealand during NaNoWriMo, watching sheep go past out the window. That detail is so specific and so unguarded it does what marketing copy can’t, which is make me want to root for her.

I rooted for her. Mostly the book lets me. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Here is what works. The premise is pure and the title is is a hell of a fucking hook. Eight people meet at a lakeside cabin for one last weekend before the place gets sold. There is a Tess in the backstory and the Tess of the backstory has been wronged in approximately the way Hardy’s Tess was wronged, scaled to a present where the Supreme Court overturning Roe shows up as text in the writer’s own interview material. The killer wears a mask of mirrored shards stitched over a skull, and a cape I am fairly sure is meant to read as cheap and theatrical, because cheap and theatrical is what the killer is doing on purpose. The weapon is a chess-piece rook that blooms open into two curved blades like a butterfly knife built by a fucked-up Swiss watchmaker. I want the prop on my wall.

The kills land. The first one in particular hits because the victim is a man we have spent a chapter inside of, and Randolph does the thing horror sometimes forgets to do, which is make a man pathetic and lonely and missable and then murder him in his own bed for reasons that land harder once you understand who he was.

Now the caveats.

The prose runs hot, by which I mean overwritten. Skin is sepia. Blood is sheen. Freckles are dancing stars. Eyes are aquamarine. Similes pile up like Tetris blocks two seconds before the game ends. There is a sentence early on about trees clawing at the sky that is good, and a sentence about the mirror-skull mask that is great, and then there are eighty more sentences about how a thing felt like or appeared like or seemed like a more colorful thing, and I started skimming. The book is 318 pages. It would be tighter at 280.

The interiority is the bigger problem. Randolph runs eight POVs and lets every single one explain itself to itself, in real time, in complete sentences. Pride shines through her misery as she speaks. Fear spikes within her too, which she wants to deny. People in this book don’t feel things and let the prose register the feeling. They feel things and then narrate the feeling to a goddamn courtroom inside their own skull. It flattens what should be eight different brains into one omniscient anxious narrator wearing eight different wigs.

And yet.

The book is doing something. By the time you arrive at the last fifty pages, the slasher is the Trojan horse. What’s inside it is a thesis about who gets to tell the survival story, what telling it costs, what kind of woman is permitted to crawl out of the woods alive with the camera still rolling. Carol Clover gets cited in the epigraph and then gets argued with for the next 290 pages, and there is a moment in the final stretch where the book lays its hand flat on the table and says here is the trick, here is the cost, here is what your final girl looks like in the year of our lord 2026. I sat with that for a minute. I wasn’t moved. I was interested. Sometimes interested is enough.

Mikayla Randolph is a CLASH Books debut. Member of the Horror Writers Association, prior short fiction in Coffin Bell and The Chamber and Watershed Review. By her own count she got a hundred query rejections on this book before CLASH bit. A hundred. Ask any writer you know how many they made it to before they shelved a draft and the answer is south of forty. Her follow-up, Those Witches Burn, is out querying as of the interview cycle for this one. I would read it.

Not Your Final Girl is uneven. The prose tells you what to feel, the structure repeats itself, the middle drags. It is also angry in a way that earns the anger, smart in a way that earns the smart, and willing to commit to a thesis most slashers chicken out of. I had a good time. I had reservations. Both were real.

Hardy gave Tess a knife and then hanged her for using it. Randolph kept the knife and skipped the rope.

About fucking time.