“Your mistake was thinking that appearing small and easy to control is the same as being small and easy to control.”
I know I’ve seen Children of the Corn. It was exactly the kind of horror movie I watched with the group of girls I was constantly having sleepovers with in middle school. I don’t remember the film, though, so maybe I didn’t, and it’s collective cultural memory or something more primal that makes my heart speed up at the thought of an evil cornfield. I wanted to read What Stalks Among Us immediately after seeing the cover and laugh-snorting at the punny title.
I waited patiently for the book from the library, then ran out of patience and purchased it, which I don’t regret because I already anticipate a reread in my future. The premise here is fun: two bisexual best friends (YAY non-romantic bisexual representation! YAY queer friendships!) enter a mysterious corn maze in the middle of nowhere. Did the pull of mystical dark magic lure them? Most definitely. But once they’re inside, it’s too late to question whether this mature cornfield should exist in the middle of Indiana in early summer. Inside, it doesn’t take them long to run into one of their murdered corpses, and to piece together that they’ve been stuck here a while.
I was grateful that we didn’t dwell on the “how” of the game-like repeating lives because I would not have been interested. Instead, in addition to lingering on the creepiness of the experience of seeing yourself dead, the book starts off leaning into the other game-like elements: learning the rules of the maze in order to escape, and trying to unravel which of the other people inside the maze is trustworthy (hint: none of them). It gets a little Happy Death Day (in a good way) in the middle as Sadie and Logan begin to remember past iterations of themselves and try to use that knowledge to get further in the maze. In the end, it’s an unexpectedly emotional rescue attempt.
The double-edged sword of YA is that the emotions are right there on the page. Sometimes this is melodramatic and whiny, and sometimes it’s resonant and cathartic. Sadie’s experience as a fat bisexual teen struggling with living confidently deeply resonated with my teenage years and made me her instant ally. This was lucky, because I was less engaged with the twin storylines of toxic relationships and emotional abuse, and I would likely have lost interest if I hadn’t been so invested in Sadie’s arc.
What Stalks Among Us had some of its strongest moments when it was showcasing Sadie and Logan’s friendship, which was refreshingly 100% platonic. They take care of each other, they fight for each other, and their connection is so strong that even the evil maze knows better than to try to separate them. It’s crazy sweet and the warm fuzzies it makes me feel will probably be what pulls me back into a reread sometime.
There’s also an on again/off again alliance with Helena, a woman who they keep encountering in the maze and who has apparently not died before (not suspicious at all). She and Sadie are on similar journeys of recovery and help each other in unexpected ways. There’s a little flirtation between her and Sadie, but nothing that blooms into romance, which I again appreciated in this friendship-centered story. She’s a great dark horse, and the story was better for having her in it.
Despite the dead bodies, it’s not an especially violent book. The vibe is more creeping dread, and the danger is often what lurks inside us.
“I think a bad memory might be a really effective trap. Loads of people go to sleep at night remembering everything they did wrong that day, or something embarrassing that happened in third grade. The maze puts you in the place you relive the most.”
Rating:
By Tiffany Albright
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