We’ll get along just fine if you try to remember that I’m not your addlepated great-aunt from East Nowhere.
-Jessica Fletcher, Murder She Wrote: Capitol Offense
At nearly eighty, Rose has an active social life, a tight-knit group of friends, a large circle of acquaintances, a potential love interest, her own apartment and—most importantly—her independence. Living in the Autumn Springs Retirement Home seems perfect. Nevertheless, in the background is the constant reminder that this home is designed to be her last:
At Autumn Springs, death is hunkered in every shadow of every room. It hovers in the high corners like a giant spider, stands at your bedside and watches you sleep, or sits congenially across the table while you sip your morning coffee, or your evening brandy.
Yet death has come to the retirement home in a grizzly new form: A serial killer is discretely picking off the residents of Autumn Springs and masking the murders as accidents or suicides. And while Rose notices how suspicious the deaths look, the police hardly care. That leaves Rose and her elderly friends alone to stop the killer.
Not since the release of the cult movie Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) have I seen a horror story set in a retirement home with primarily elderly characters. In most horror stories, the one or two token elderly characters are often portrayed as doddering invalids or sour-tempered grinches living in the past. And yes, those character types appear in this novel; but they aren’t the sole representatives of senior citizens. This feels unique. Peter Straub’s classic horror novel Ghost Story (1979) centers on a group of septuagenarians, but even it has a younger hero. Usually when the victim pool is homogenous, it’s a young group: college sororities, Spring Break camping trips, high schoolers sneaking out of bedroom windows, and children following clowns into the sewers. It’s what’s typically expected of the genre. Fans of the Scream franchise might know Randy Meeks’s rules to survive a horror movie by heart: no sex, no drink, no drugs and don’t say I’ll be right back. But Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson didn’t invent those guidelines out of nothing. They’re a pattern in the genre which emphasizes a theme that only works with young victims: the loss of innocence, something seen alternately as a tragedy or a sin, but almost always something to punish—and in slashers, why not with a machete?
In this novel, Fracassi keeps the machete but challenges our assumptions. Instead of commenting on the moral and physical complications of entering adulthood, this book is an exploration of the psychology of ageing, frailty, and agency; as well as a critique on stereotypical portrayals of the elderly. The book reaffirms the idea that it’s an important part of an individual’s personal culture to hear their elders’ stories and learn from their past. But it rejects the associated impulse to treat senior citizens like relics and not contemporaries. Reducing them to their past forces them into categories: the interesting ones repositories of knowledge or walking libraries; those with happy, uneventful, lives the sweet grandparents who live for the attention of the young; those who are jealous of youth, sharp-tongued witches with quick wits and pockets full of bitter candy. These are all fun characters to write and read about and Fracassi doesn’t completely discard them. But in The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, his characters are also living in the present and looking to their futures. Depending on the occasion, walking libraries can also be sweet grandmas or sharp-tongued witches. They can fall in love, be yoga enthusiasts, and become civilian homicide detectives. Fracassi’s elderly characters aren’t just types. They have rich and complex psychological lives.
The characters in this novel know their time is limited, but they dislike acknowledging death unless it’s softened with a joke. Rose illustrates this in the novel’s opening chapter, during a movie night on which her friend Gopi shows the group The Seventh Seal.
Rose has seen better movies.
Not that she doesn’t enjoy something artistic, mind you. But this?
This was goddamned depressing, is what this was.
Who the hell shows a bunch of old folks a movie about Death?
The wry humor of opening this horror novel with Rose thinking narratives about death are depressing sets the mood. During the discussion following the movie, Rose mischievously asks why Death would bother playing chess (as in The Seventh Seal) because, as she read in her book club book,
“‘Death waits for no man.’ And I think that sounds about right.” She glances quickly around the room. “Present company excluded, of course.”
There’s a murmur of laughter from the others, and even Gopi smiles at Rose.
She has translated her internal dialogue, within which death is “goddamned depressing,” into the butt of a joke between her and her fellow retirees. The book has many other moments in which one of the characters takes the received idea that happiness is inevitably diminished in the absence of a long future … and in each case goes on to tear that falsehood apart.
Another example of this is the story’s first murder and its perceived fallout. After the movie, Rose’s friend Angela approaches her, asking if she could call her the next day:
Rose smiles, knowing what Angela really needs is a girlfriend to chatterbox with about the new man in her life. “Of course, hon. Why don’t we have lunch?” She gives a little wink and lowers her own voice to match Angela’s conspiratorial whisper. “Just us girls.”
Angela snickers and nods. “Yes, yes please.”
There’s pleasure in the sort of conversation that we often associate with the young taking place between these elderly women. They’re aware of it and snicker happily at tomorrow’s promised girl-talk. And, when Rose’s friend is killed (just one blood-curdling scene later), Fracassi insists that the killer is “abruptly ending Angela Forrest’s long, joy-filled life.” This is an important detail: Not only do we earlier see Angela’s happiness in her anticipation of a gossipy afternoon, but even at the violent end, her “joy-filled life” is insisted on. The ending is a tragedy. But life, right up to its extinction, was a joy that was all her own.
The police deal horribly with the retirees’ deaths, implying that, as the only future left to the elderly is the grave, how they get there is a minor detail. When they’re investigating another death, they decide it’s a suicide before questioning potential witnesses. The officer interviewing Rose is shockingly glib about her neighbor’s passing:
“[I]f I’m being honest? This is all a big waste of time, don’t you think, Ms. DuBois? I mean, people probably die here every other day, am I right?”
As rain, the dark voice in [Rose’s] mind hisses.
Despite Rose’s suspicions, the early deaths at Autumn Springs are considered accidents or suicides. Though incorrect, it’s an assumption that reflects a real-world problem: Associating life’s value with a long future is so ingrained in our worldview that suicide rates are elevated among people recently diagnosed with a terminal illness. It’s almost as if we think the tragedy is death’s approach instead of death itself. Meditating on that is goddamned depressing.
The novel addresses how easy it is to think a retirement home confirms this assumed connection of ageing to tragedy. In the retirement home we see a removal from family, community, and home. Fracassi’s characters don’t ignore that perception, but they give it nuance. For example, before the murders begin, life in the retirement home almost reads like a return to youth: Characters join clubs, start romances, and form cliques. But, despite some similarities, this is no return to high school. They’re all old and they know it. They don’t join clubs in preparation for a future life. They don’t start romances in anticipation of building a family. They don’t have big parties to build up their social standing. They do these things because they know how to value the present.
Indeed, for Rose, the retirement home is a place of liberation. Still, once the murders become more and more obvious to everyone except the police, she considers leaving in a conversation with her friend Tatum:
I don’t want to leave, but I don’t want to get hurt either […] I could go live with my daughter […] But I can’t leave you, or Miller, or Gopi, or any of the others living here who I consider friends and neighbors. Who would I talk to every day? What would I do at my daughter’s house except get in the way? I love my grandchild, but I don’t want to be a live-in babysitter, or a cook, or a maid. I like my freedom. I like being independent.
Rose lives in the retirement community to get the most out of the remaining years of her life. The community, the relationships, and the friendships all oppose the idea that the retirement home (this one at least) is a step away from the world, a step away from home. In this community, the residents are all actors in their destiny and are taken seriously by their peers. Outside the community, in the world of the patronizing young, Rose would be reduced to a type: a babysitter, a cook, a maid, or—worst of all—a burden. This answers the question that every horror fan (and detractor) asks about the characters: Why don’t they just leave? With Rose it’s a potent mixture of loyalty, desire, pride, and identity. For the less assertive retirement home residents, it’s because their family won’t take them.
While Rose is unquestionably the primary character, chapters are dedicated to others as well—even to the serial killer. This is one example of how the novel’s style supports its content masterfully. The book is full of nods to classic genre cinema and television, and there’s certainly something cinematic about how Fracassi gives each victim a chapter to show their death. But, while film gives us visual insight into its characters, Fracassi also offers us the victims’ interior lives, those unique thoughts and emotions that the murderer is about to stamp out. This is something an image on the screen can’t do and it’s a wonderful example of how a literary slasher should work. While the gory details are important, they can’t be the primary focus in fiction. Visuals that create empathy on the screen don’t always translate directly to the page. But with Fracassi, we get cinematic gore at the same time as literary interiority, making characters that we genuinely mourn once they’re gone.
In this way, a particularly ingenious stylistic choice in Fracassi’s alternating characters is the distinction made between the chapters featuring victims and those from the point of view of the serial killer. In the chapters featuring Autumn Springs residents, the narration is a close third person, a point of view that allows for both external descriptions of the characters (what’s a slasher if you don’t get any slashing?) and for delving into their interior lives. However, the murderer’s chapters are from a first-person perspective. Apart from making for deliciously skin-crawling reading, this is a clever choice. It heightens the tension by giving us sufficient glimpses into the killer’s plans while also avoiding having to disclose their identity. The killer can hide behind the narrative “I” (as few people address themselves by name) while at the same time dropping subtle hints at who they might be.
On the surface, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre is a slasher-detective story that a fan of either genre could enjoy in a quiet study on a dark October night or on a sunny beach chair while sipping cocktails. Like its understated, powerful characters, it won’t demand that you go on a deep, soul-searching journey. It’s an excellent pleasure read, then—but one that happens also to be full of thought-provoking questions about how we view tragedy, death, and the value of individual happiness. For every goddamned depressing end of a character, we’re reminded of all the potential life has for love and joy. This is a gripping, terrifying, beautiful story that didn’t just make me reevaluate how I read aged characters; it also made me question how I interact with the elders in my life.