What Happened to Those Girls: Review of Carlyn Greenwald’s Chilling Thriller

Three dead girls, one witch legend, and the suspect nobody invited.

Three girls die on a camping trip the fourth one planned, and that fourth girl was never invited. That is the trap Carlyn Greenwald springs in What Happened to Those Girls, a queer YA horror thriller that buries its dead in a witch-cursed ghost town and dares Emma to go back for the truth. This is small-town folk horror with a true-crime brain and a love story running through its core. If you want grief, betrayal, and a suspect-narrator who cannot prove her own innocence, Greenwald has built exactly that, and she does it without a single wasted scene.

What Happened to Those Girls | Carlyn Greenwald | Sourcebooks Fire | June 30, 2026 |

Three girls walk into the woods on a trip Emma mapped out herself, and Emma stays home, uninvited, while the plan she built carries her friends off without her. By morning all three are dead. That is the opening blow of Carlyn Greenwald’s What Happened to Those Girls, and she does not give you a second to steady yourself before the next one lands.

Greenwald is not interested in splatter, though there is blood when blood is earned. This book works your nerves instead of your gut. The dread builds the way a slow leak fills a basement. You barely register the water rising until your socks are wet and the stairs look further away than they did an hour ago.

The anonymous videos are where the unease really tightens. Footage of the girls on their last night starts arriving from a source Emma cannot trace. Each clip says two things at once. Her friends were not alone out there. And someone wants Emma to know that she was not where she claimed to be.

That double meaning is the engine of the whole thing. There is the fear of whatever moved through the campsite that night, and there is the colder fear that every piece of proof points back at the girl nobody invited. Emma went to the woods after all. Somebody filmed her doing it. If the police ever call it murder, she is suspect number one, and she knows it before they do.

So she does the only thing that might save her. She goes back. She partners with Beck, the sister of one of the dead girls, and the two of them return to the trees to dig up what actually happened. Two girls, one of them grieving, one of them already half-accused, walking willingly into the place that swallowed three others. The premise alone keeps your shoulders up around your ears.

What I admired most early on is how little Greenwald explains. She trusts you to feel the wrongness before she names it. The town is empty, the legend is half a rumour, and the phone keeps buzzing with proof Emma never asked for. You assemble the threat yourself, which is always scarier than being handed one. By the time the woods close in, you have already done the author’s work for her, and you have only your own imagination to blame.

Greenwald paces like someone who has spent real time in an editing bay, and she has; she trained in film as well as fiction. Scenes cut where they need to cut. She trusts a hard stop. She will end a chapter on a single image and make you sit with it rather than explain it away.

The book rides close to Emma, so close that her guilt and her suspicion bleed into how you read everyone else. That choice does a lot of quiet work. When the narrator is the prime suspect, every friendly face reads like a possible accuser, and Greenwald lets that paranoia colour the prose without ever spelling it out. You start side-eyeing characters because Emma does.

Teenagers in this book talk like teenagers who lie to each other for sport, which is to say the friendship was rotten in spots long before anyone died. Greenwald writes that social cruelty comes with a steady hand. She lets the meanness sit. She does not rush to soften it or punish it. That patience is what makes the grief land later, because you understand exactly what Emma lost and exactly how complicated the loss is.

Strip away the witch and the woods, and you find a book about who gets believed. The title carries the whole argument. What Happened to Those Girls is the language of a news crawl, the flat phrasing strangers use when young women die and the story gets passed around for entertainment. Greenwald studied forensics and criminality, and you can feel that interest working under the plot. She is poking at the way our culture turns dead girls into content, into legend, into a case file, into anything except people.

The witch legend feeds the same idea. Towns have always pinned their disasters on women who did not fit, then dressed the blame up as folklore. Set that old habit next to a modern friend group ready to hand Emma over the second things go wrong, and the book quietly suggests the mechanism never really changed. We just swapped the pyre for the group chat.

Then there are the videos, which give the whole thing a surveillance-age chill. Everyone is filmed now. Everyone leaves a trail. Greenwald takes that ordinary fact and twists it into a noose, because proof, it turns out, is only as honest as the person holding it.

Underneath the fear there is tenderness, and it surprised me how much room she made for it. Emma and Beck move from suspicion toward something gentler, and the queer thread of the story never feels bolted on. It grows out of grief and shared danger, the way real closeness sometimes does. Two girls clinging to each other in the one place neither should be. The romance does not blunt the horror. It raises the stakes, because now there is something left to lose.

You can draw a straight line from Murder Land to this book. Both circle the same uncomfortable question: what does it do to us to treat real violence as a ride, a legend, a thrill? What Happened to Those Girls sharpens that question and gives it teeth. The romance writer is still in here too. It shows in how carefully she builds the bond between Emma and Beck, how much she clearly likes her characters even while she puts them through hell. The growth across these books is in control. The early novels charm you. This one charms you, then closes the door behind you.

Call it YA horror with folk-horror bones and a queer heart. It belongs to the current wave of young adult horror that cares as much about character and social nerve as it does about scares, the strand that keeps asking what the genre’s old tropes are really doing to us.

If you want shelf neighbours, reach for Courtney Summers, whose Sadie and The Project gut you with girls the world refuses to see clearly. Reach for Tiffany D. Jackson, whose White Smoke and The Weight of Blood fold real social fear into genuine dread. Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder sits nearby on the amateur-sleuth side.

What sets Greenwald’s book apart is the fusion. She takes the suspect-narrator thriller, the one where the person investigating is also the person being accused, and she grafts it onto a folk-horror trunk, then runs a queer love story up the middle of it. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and she makes it hold.

Greenwald knows where the real horror lives. Not in the woods, not in the witch, but in how fast everyone agrees on which girl to blame

What Happened to Those Girls by Carlyn Greenwald

Pretty Little Liars meets The Blair Witch Project in this harrowing thriller from the author of Murder Land, brimming with betrayal, unsettling town secrets, and a killer lurking in the woods.

Emma knows her friends all lie to her. And everyone knows Emma is the outcast of their group. She’s usually fine with that, until her friends go on a camping trip that she planned…without her. The next morning, she wakes up to the news that all three of them died at the campsite.

When Emma starts receiving unnerving videos of the girls the night they died from an anonymous source, it becomes clear their deaths weren’t an accident. And if this becomes a murder case, Emma will be suspect number one. Because while everyone knows she had been excluded from the plans, what they don’t know is that she went to the campsite that night after all, and someone has proof.

Emma teams up with Beck, one of the victims’ sisters, to return to the woods and figure out what really happened the night her friends died, uncover who is behind the mysterious videos she is receiving, and make sure that nobody can pin their murders on her. But stranded in an eerie town that doesn’t welcome outsiders with a murderer on their heels, Emma and Beck just might be next…

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