Say Her Name

Juno Dawson

This YA horror revisits the urban legend of Bloody Mary. Do you dare utter her name?

You know this one, right? You light a few candles in a dark bathroom, look into a mirror, and repeat the name Bloody Mary. The number of repetitions varies — five, thirteen, or even forty-seven — but if you perform the ritual correctly, Mary will appear. She may reach out from the mirror. She might scratch your face or be released from the afterlife to haunt you. Your hair could turn white, the mirror may drip blood, or you might simply disappear without a trace.

There’s an on-going debate about the origins of Bloody Mary. Some say she’s based on Mary I of England. When that Mary took the throne in 1553, she burned 300 people at the stake for heresy. Bad girl! Another theory is that Bloody Mary was one Mary Worth who lived in either colonial New England or 19th-century America — and was either a witch, a hermit, a kidnapper of children, or a murderer of enslaved people who escaped. What the various mythologiesy do agree on is that when Ms. Worth met her own demise at the hands of the villagers, she used her last breaths to place a curse on anyone who spoke her name.

The great fun of this novel is the theory of the Bloody Mary legend presented by author Juno Dawson. But before that revelation, there are plenty of blood-soaked shenanigans.

The story is set at Piper’s Hall School for girls. And the action begins on Halloween night. With a dare. During a raging storm.

Our heroine is Roberta Rowe, aka Bobbie. A practical girl who definitely does not believe in ghosts, despite the spooky boarding school at which she finds herself. Piper’s Hall sits atop a cliff battered by high winds and waves. Its towers and turrets topped with metal spikes evoke ‘every haunted castle from childhood nightmares.’

Bobbie loathes the elitism at her school, but its secret passages are a point in the institution’s favor. (Although she deems the dormitory names pretentious. Each wing is named for a classic female author: Austen, Brontë, Christie, and Dickinson.)

On Halloween night, a group of teenagers have gathered in the PE shed on the edge of the hockey field. There’s our girl Bobbie, her roommate/bestie, a handful of other classmates — including Sadie, the school’s reigning Mean Girl — and two smuggled-in boys. Bobbie is feeling equal parts bored and competitive, so when the group sarcastically dares her to play the Bloody Mary game, she struts straight to the closest bathroom mirror.

At the stroke of midnight, Bobbie, her roomie, and the town cutie Caine face themselves in a candlelit mirror. Holding hands, they chant Bloody Mary the required five times. The candles flicker and then… nothing. As the laughing, whooping teenagers leave the bathroom, a quiet drip, drip, drip echoes off the shower tiles.

The next morning, before Sunday breakfast in the dining hall, Bobbie goes about her routine as usual. But when she steps out of the shower and towels dry, two words appear in the condensation on the bathroom mirror: FIVE DAYS.

Soon she and her friends are having decidedly weird experiences: gushing nose bleeds, ghostly apparitions in the hallway, the disappearance of another student — and the relentless drip, drip, drip in the bathroom. Bobbie and Caine realize that they actually did summon Bloody Mary from the other side, and they only have five days to undo the curse before Mary comes for them.

This book is a hoot: scary enough without being too frightening to read at night — although you might find yourself avoiding direct eye contact with a bathroom mirror in the dark. Dawson does a nice job with the vibe of teenage friendship, and the horror has an ending worthy of Scooby-Doo (compliment).

Checking the coast was clear, Sadie pushed on an oak panel located between the kitchen and the dining room. ‘I can’t believe you have legit secret passages!’ Caine said with boyish glee.

The so-called ‘secret passages’ had been Bobbie’s only reason for agreeing to come to the school — the promise of Scooby Doo revolving bookcases and Temple of Doom caverns filled with bugs had appealed to her eleven-year-old self. Turned out, the ‘secret passages’ were, in fact, little more than servants’ passages from when the main block of the school was a stately home. Allegedly, there were priests’ holes, too, dating back even further, although Bobbie had never seen one. — Juno Dawson

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