REVIEW: The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi
In the meta horror masterpiece movie The Cabin in the Woods—where the cabin itself is designed to stave off the apocalypse by releasing monsters to kill the unknowingly sacrificial twenty year olds and thus appease the ancient gods—the villains explain to the final heroes how they all represent certain horror tropes: the jock, the jester, the virgin, etc. The unifying theme? They’re all young, and it’s not their time to die. That’s what powers a good horror, and even more so a good slasher: young people with everything to live for, cut down brutally. But what if the slasher victims are the elderly, with a decade or so, maybe much less, to live out their life? How does that change the horror rules, and how can a slasher work around that? It’s going to take a great horror author to get this right, and so enter Philip Fracassi, who with The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, out now, has taken the slasher genre to new places and in the process written a deeply moving, marvellously twisty, and terrifyingly dark tale which gives us one of modern horror’s most triumphant final girls in the indomitable pensioner Rose DuBois.
The aforesaid Rose is in her late seventies and living out her twilight years in the eponymous retirement home Autumn Springs. This is not some depressing parking spot for the nearly dead: its apartments are spacious and sought after, and the fancy community facilities allow for all manner of social activities. Indeed, many of its residents are in fine fettle, having bagged a hard-to-get place in this friendly community in anticipation of future failing health. Rose herself has a nice life; a dapper gentleman friend Miller, who she keeps in the friendzone despite his obvious feelings for her, a daughter who clearly cares for her and a wide circle of friends. But when one of her friends dies, allegedly after a fall in the bath, Rose becomes suspicious as to whether the cause of death is entirely correct, and when others start dying in similarly suspicious ways, Rose begins to suspect there may be a serial killer in their midst. In the face of sceptical authorities, the question becomes: what is she going to do about it?
The first thing that grabbed me in The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre was the masterful way in which Fracassi handles the tone. In his arguably finest work so far, Boys in the Valley, we get a similarly confined space where hell descends on a community home, in that case an orphanage. But where that book is brutal from the start, here the early chapters almost feel like a cosy crime mystery—Richard Osman in the States—as Rose rounds up her gang of friends to investigate the mysterious goings on. But Fracassi is a horror writer first, not a crime writer, and this gentle, heartwarming community feel soon descends into a claustrophobic, nightmarish smorgasbord of paranoia, pain, and endless death, made all the more horrifying by the deceptive start.
Another success of this tale is how Fracassi handles the subject of the elderly. A cynic might ask: why should we fear for these characters whose lives are almost over anyway? Indeed, this is a book that doesn’t shy away from some of the depressing truths of the end of life. Next to the fancy retirement flats is a medical centre where you go when you need round the clock care—the flats there aren’t so nice, and all live in fear of being forced to go there. And for all the community feel, when things go bad the truth of old age is revealed: not everyone’s families care enough to come to the rescue of their endangered elder members. This is a book full of the realisation that life is running out of road, and regrets may be more potent than future plans. But—and it is such an important but—Fracassi also wants to transmit a message of hope and a counter to the prevailing narrative of the elderly as different from the rest of us and somehow less invested in the world. Rose has many things she still wants to do: plans, dreams, maybe even a shot at love. She’s far from done yet, and no one reading this book could get the impression that she has come to Autumn Springs to die. If anything, the ending of this book suggests, she has come here to finally live.
Those chewy themes aside, let’s be clear: The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre is enormously grisly fun; the killer is endlessly inventive and enormously creepy, when the chaos starts it really starts, and Fracassi has handled the slasher reveal perfectly as if he was an author who has been writing slashers all his career—the clues are all there in retrospect but it’s not an obvious one (I came close but no cigar—you got me, Philip) and the red herrings are magisterially done.
And maybe the most important thing to be said about this book is just what a character for the modern slasher age we have in Rose du Bois. Fearless, indomitable, bowing to no one—but kind and vulnerable and haunted by the secrets in her past, which you definitely won’t see coming. Agism has found a powerful foe in Rose, and the care with which Fracassi has given this character makes this one of his finest horror efforts yet. Oh and one Rose-related moment that came out of nowhere made me cry, the kind of surprised tears where a book takes you somewhere you didn’t see coming. You’ll cry too—this book is as moving a slasher as you’ll ever read.
Overall, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre is a superbly creepy yet truly moving slasher that rivals Fracassi’s best work. His first trick is to make the elderly the victims, but his second is just as impressive: to make you care so deeply for them amongst the carnage. Age is just a number—in this case, a body count.
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