Like all good horror stories, My Best Friend's Exorcism  kept me up late into the night. Filled with 80s nostalgia and centered on one really powerful friendship, this book is solid. My Best Friend's Exorcism has a fairly simple plot. After some friends try LSD, one of their number goes missing. She turns up only a few hours later but seems sick, affected by the drugs when the rest were pretty sure they were duds. As the days progress, she gets worse, until suddenly she's normal again. Has she recovered or is the worst still to come? While a lot of the plot is in the book's title, the story that Grady Hendrix crafts is pretty special due to its character focus and solid world building.

Every chapter in this book begins with a quote from a classic 80s tune. My Best Friend's Exorcism is immersed in 80s lore in a way that is cute and a little scary. While this theme was popularized by Stranger Things, I do think Hendrix has a good reason to set his story here. Having a possession story in the middle of the satanic panic adds some interesting context to the tale.

Alongside its setting, My Best Friends Exorcism features some well written protagonists. Probably because of its similarity to Stranger Things, I just assumed that the story would focus on two boys, but it instead concentrates on the friendship of two tenth grade girls and their larger friend group. The connection between the two leads, Abby and Gretchen, feels well set up and meaningful. Losing touch with someone or otherwise feeling unimportant to them is the worst, and framing that sort of conflict through possession is actually fairly potent.