Final Girls With Heart: Writing Survivors with Empathy By Ryan Douglass, for Pretty Little Memoirs
Final Girls With Heart: Writing Survivors with Empathy By Ryan Douglass, for Pretty Little Memoirs
When it came time to write Mara’s journey in Night of Madness, I knew I wanted two things to be true about her: she would have a ruthless will to live and a big heart.
Mara is cynical, guarded, blunt, and doesn’t trust easily. But she still cares about people, and understands that being good and kind is more important than being nice.
That duality makes her the perfect protagonist for Night of Madness—a story about five people competing in a survival show, convinced there can only be one winner. The contestants want the money or the chance to become famous, and Mara, like everyone else, has her own motivation. But when the rules change and the game becomes a fight to stay alive, everyone’s true character is revealed by how they treat the people standing next to them. Do they see them as competitors? Obstacles? Or as people who are just as scared and desperate to make it out alive?
Mara endures situations where the people around her are forced to make survival decisions, with some deciding that the easiest way to survive is to become colder. She’s made to question whether she can survive without becoming someone she doesn’t recognize, like one of Jack Stanley’s robotic cronies. She cares about her competitors’ fates, even if she doesn’t know them well. She wants to help when it is safer to leave people behind.
I think that’s especially interesting in a culture that teaches us to look out for ourselves, focus on self-preservation, and get ahead. Those lessons can be useful, as there are absolutely times when you need to be discerning and protect yourself. But there is a difference between protecting yourself and deciding that your life is more valuable than someone else’s.
We’re taught that survivors are people who’ve had to develop thick skin to endure pain. They’re hard to hurt because they’ve learned to be strategic and guarded. But what about the person who gets hurt and still chooses to care? The person who holds onto softness even after they’ve been given reasons to let those things go?
It’s hard to show empathy when the stakes are high—when you’ve been abused, or convinced that helping somebody else might get you killed. But empathy also becomes most meaningful when there is no obvious reward for it. When it involves a personal choice about who you want to be, regardless of how much cruelty you’ve endured.
I wanted Mara to defeat the murderer, but not without being changed by what happened, and not without doing things she wouldn’t normally do to match the dire circumstances she was in. Because through all of that, she still has to decide how she wants to walk out of it.
She’s not endlessly kind or caring, and she’s capable of making merciless choices. But she keeps looking out for others, even once the cameras go off. She doesn’t become a selfish and vengeful shell of a person like Jack. She gets to come back to herself.
When I think about horror with heart, I think about that part of survival: not just whether someone is alive or dead at the end, but what they have left of themselves when it’s over. What did they hold onto? What did they refuse to become?
I hope that’s what readers of Night of Madness will be rooting for underneath all the spectacle and terror.
Ryan Douglass
is the author of young adult horror novel The Taking of Jake Livingston, a New York Times bestseller and an ALA Rainbow Book List Pick; The Great Disillusionment of Nick and Jay, a reimagining of The Great Gatsby set in 1920s Harlem; and Night of Madness, a collaboration with the company behind Clown in a Cornfield. His work explores the ways young people fight to survive in hostile worlds. He lives in Atlanta with his dog and spends his free time baking ambitious desserts and scoping out true crime documentaries.
What Pretty Little Memoirs thought of Night Of Madness:
Piercing and terrifying yet laced with a soft tenderness, Mara’s story in Night of Madness pushes past the traditional slasher style of teen horror stories and opts for something thoroughly inventive. A truly twisted wonderland that cuts deep, unnerving you one moment and moving you the next. I felt like I was inside a movie reading this!
Ryan Douglass delivers a page-turning tale that is less about fear (although there are many scenes that’ll have you rattled) and more about the art of survival through the eyes of a young girl turning her vulnerabilities and past into an opportunity for something better, and her wounds into her ultimate power of the upper hand. It was impossible to put down and equally as impossible to not root for Mara from the start. This is by far one of my favourite YA horrors I’ve read in years, and I can see it being a firm, re-read favourite for years to come. (Full thoughts soon!)
happy reading!
