Some demons don’t need a summoning circle. Some of them raised you.
Party of a Lifetime by Henry Corrigan: A Queer Body Horror Novel That Puts the Real Monster in the Driveway
Henry Corrigan’s Party of a Lifetime opens with a woman in a ruined church, scratching four names onto an altar in chalk that smells of urine. A year after the worst prom night in living memory, Becca Longford gathers her three closest friends for a redo weekend at the beach.
They never get there. The road ends, the sky goes black, and the four of them arrive in Monotony, a 1950s suburb in hell that reshapes itself around whatever its visitors fear most. This queer body horror novel from Byzantium Sky Press is a coming-of-age story with its skin peeled back, and it is Corrigan’s most ambitious book yet. It is also his most patient, which turns out to be both the making of it and its one real limitation.
“The horror in Monotony is grotesque and inventive, but the scene that will follow you home is a woman in expensive running gear explaining, patiently, that her daughter’s suffering is her daughter’s own fault.”
Party of a Lifetime by Henry Corrigan: A Queer Body Horror Novel That Puts the Real Monster in the Driveway
The cruellest people are rarely the ones who want you dead. They are the ones who need you alive, and watching, and grateful. They want an audience for the performance of their own suffering, and they want that audience to apologise for the ticket price. Anyone who has grown up in that particular weather system knows the sound of it: the fine, patient, endlessly reasonable voice explaining why your existence is an inconvenience they have borne nobly.
Henry Corrigan has built an entire hell out of that voice, and then he has made you drive through it.
Party of a Lifetime takes four friends, Becca, Gabby, Kyle and Toby, and drops them into Monotony, a town of identical ranch houses where the porch lights burn, the turkey steams on every dining table, and nobody has lived for a very long time. The residents are held together with sticky tape. The women who come at you with butcher knives ring like bells when you kick them, and bleed motor oil when you finally get one down. The sprinklers spit something that is not water and eats through cotton in seconds.
Corrigan’s imagination for this stuff is properly deranged in the best way. The Yes Dears, a chorus of Donna Reed automatons in leather butcher’s aprons, are among the better horror creations I have read this year, largely because they are so cheerfully polite about it. One of them, half-destroyed, examines the splinters Gabby has driven into her jaw and observes, with something close to gratitude, that she will not be his favourite any more.
Corrigan makes a very deliberate choice here, and it is the choice that separates this novel from the crowded shelf of “friends trapped somewhere awful” horror. The four of them do not get picked off. They get changed. Gabby, the soccer captain, loses her hair in clumps, starts tasting blood with pleasure, and slides by degrees into something on four legs that still, mostly, loves her friends.
Toby’s skin begins to flake away like old butcher paper. Kyle liquefies from the bones outward until he has to be carried in a beer cooler. Becca, our eye on all of it, goes numb and heavy and starts to ring when struck, a girl slowly becoming the machine she spent her life learning to repair.
It is a genuinely upsetting idea, executed with a mechanic’s patience. And that is the metaphor for this prose, because Corrigan writes like someone with his head under a bonnet, listening. He does not describe the damage; he times it. He notices what has started ticking that was not ticking before. The horror arrives as diagnosis.
Spoiler in the next paragraph
Here is the passage I keep coming back to. The van is out of oil and there is nothing to fill it with except the corpse of one of the Yes Dears. Becca takes a butcher knife to the dead woman’s throat, and before she starts, she looks at her properly for the first time: green eyes, real blonde hair with no roots showing, laugh lines at the mouth and eyes that Monotony has not managed to sand off. Becca decides the woman must once have known how to tell a good joke, and she is sad she will never hear it. Then she says sorry, twice, and starts to saw.
That is the whole novel in one image. The care and the butchery are the same gesture. Becca’s competence, the thing her mother has spent her daughter’s life describing as a waste of a good brain, is what keeps everyone alive, and it costs her a piece of herself every time she uses it. Corrigan does not underline any of this. He just puts the knife in her hand and lets you do the arithmetic.
The prose elsewhere is looser and more conversational than that suggests, and mostly to the good. These four talk like actual friends of that age, which is to say constantly, filthily, and over each other. The banter carries a lot of weight and it earns its keep, because you cannot make an audience grieve for people it has not enjoyed. Toby is the standout, genderfluid, tiny, filthy-minded and braver than he lets on, and the running gag about his pronouns reducing Becca’s dad to a sputtering heap is funny without ever tipping into a lesson. Kyle’s coming out, and the parents who stopped returning his calls afterwards, gets about four lines and lands harder than a chapter would have.
Corrigan is also funnier than a book this grim has any business being, and he knows exactly how to use it. There is a scarred, weeping harbinger in overalls whom the friends nickname Clowny, a man whose actual job is to warn people away in a manner calculated to make them press on regardless, and whose one-eyed terrier Boffo is the closest thing hell has to a moral compass. Boffo eats a severed hand. Boffo naps through a torture scene. Boffo also, in the end, is the reason anyone has a plan at all.
That register, gallows humour played absolutely straight, is hard to hold for three hundred pages, and Corrigan holds it. When Becca relieves herself in a hell house bathroom and finds herself silently thanking her own bladder for still working, the joke and the body horror are the same sentence. Her organs are shutting down one by one, and the one that still reports for duty gets a promise of a treat.
Thematically the book is working the ground that Stephen King staked out with Carrie and Margaret White, but Corrigan is after something less operatic and more recognisable. Irene Longford is not a religious fanatic. She is an influencer. She wants a castle in the sky, she wants a franchise, and she has found investors who deal in guarantees rather than maybes.
The satire is light-fingered and all the better for it: the demonic contract turns out to be a multi-level marketing scheme, and the scroll Becca is ordered to sign is unreadable calligraphy on paper still warm from the press, sealed with a strip of the same tape holding the residents together. It is the funniest and coldest idea in the novel. Hell does not need to trick you. It just needs you to want a bigger house.
Mild spoiler for the antagonist reveal in the next paragraph.
The reveal itself is well handled. Corrigan spends the first half dangling Stephanie Hamilton, the mean girl with the emoji death threats, as an obvious candidate, and it works because you want it to be her. It is tidier that way. The truth, that Becca’s mother has traded her daughter and her daughter’s friends to a mid-ranking demon in exchange for brand ambassadorship and a castle in the sky, is much less tidy, and the scene where she explains it is the best writing in the book.
She is not raving. She is reasoning. She wants Becca to see that this is all Becca’s fault, and she is genuinely baffled that her daughter cannot follow the logic. Anyone raised by a narcissist will read that chapter with their jaw clenched.
Set against the rest of the shelf, this sits somewhere between Grady Hendrix and Kathe Koja. It has Hendrix’s affection for its cast and his instinct for period-kitsch monstrosity, the Yes Dears being cousins to anything in My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and it has Koja’s interest in the body as something that betrays you slowly and specifically. What Corrigan adds is the domestic accounting. This is a book about what a bad parent costs, told through a girl who can hear her own legs failing.
It is also a clear step up. A Man in Pieces (Bloodhound Books) took the silver medal from Literary Titan, and Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light (Slashic Horror Press) made the Bram Stoker Award Reading List and one of our own best-of-the-year lists. The advance across those three books is in control. Corrigan has always been able to hurt a reader. What he has learned here is when not to, and how much longer a wound stings if you make the reader wait for it.
This is the first in a series, and the ending makes no secret of it. Becca finishes the book with a promise, a torn monogrammed handkerchief and a friend still in hell. It is a fine hook.
Party of a Lifetime by Henry Corrigan
Welcome to Hell 🙂
You don’t deserve to be here.
For Becca Longford, prom was supposed to be the best night of her life, and in a way…it was. Despite parental meltdowns, “mean girl” machinations, and a fire, Becca and her friends forged an unbreakable bond.
Now, one year later, Becca looks to recreate the night that could’ve been.
Too bad someone else has other plans.
In the bowels of an unholy church, a deal has been struck. One which will drag the four friends to Monotony, a hellish town full of depraved demons. Forced to fight for their lives, the friends must rely on each other to survive. But the longer they stay, the more Monotony twists them into horrific abominations.
Will Becca and her friends make it home alive?
Will any of them still be human if they do?
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