Rose DuBois is not your average final girl..
Rose is in her late 70s, living out her golden years at the Autumn Springs Retirement Home.
When one of her friends dies alone in her apartment, Rose isn’t too concerned. Accidents happen, especially at this age!
Then another resident drops dead. And another. With bodies stacking up, Rose can’t help but wonder: are these accidents? Old age? Or something far more sinister?
Together with her best friend Miller, Rose begins to investigate. The further she digs, the more convinced she becomes: there’s a killer on the loose at Autumn Springs, and if she isn’t careful, Rose may be their next victim.

IN A NUTSHELL
This was an absolute romp of a book. It has everything: a serial killer, witches, a visit from an alien, some of the most creative ways of killing people that I’ve seen in a long time, a rich suspect pool, a constantly shifting sense of where the book was going, and an unstoppable momentum. At times, it was a little too busy, and motives seemed fairly thin on the ground, but it kept me listening and speculating and going, “Surely they won’t… Yep. They did. Wow.” at regular intervals.

This was my first book by Philip Fracassi, and almost everything in it came as a surprise to me, but in a good way. The energy of the book is irrepressible, if sometimes a little frenetic. I’d expected it to be one of those older-person-plays-amateur-sleuth-and-prevails books. It wasn’t. It was darker than that. I should have paid more attention to the word massacre in the title and to the reference to Rose DuBois as a final girl. 

At its heart, this is a horror novel that keeps you speculating about whether or not anything supernatural is involved until the final chapters. The body count is high. The means used to kill people are inventive, vicious, and graphically described. 

In some senses, this is a romp. The pace is often fast. The twists and turns of the book make guessing the identity of the killer both irresistible and impossible. The likely explanations and list of possible suspects are outlandish enough to include witches, demons, aliens, and just about any resident or staff member of the Autumn Springs Retirement Home. The killings are mostly set pieces where the tension is high, the suspense almost unbearable, and the action is graphic and often surprising. 

Yet this is a novel laced with sadness. Philip Fracassi breathed life into the Autumn Springs Retirement Home residents. Yes, they are all old, some of them have memory problems, some are terminally ill, but almost all of them value the lives they are living. They have hopes, passions, and purposes that their deaths extinguish. And this is a novel where no character’s survival, no matter how cherished or how central to the plot, is guaranteed.

Sometimes the sheer number of things going on made reading the book a little dizzying, and the apparent paucity of motives made it hard to understand why any of this was happening, but none of that stopped my wife and me from speculating on who the killer was, who would die next, how they would die, and whether anyone would survive.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre‘. Janaury Le Voy does a great job with the narration. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.

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I think that, in Philip Fracassi, I’ve found an author who is on my wavelength. I’ve already downloaded ‘Gothic‘ (2023) a horror novel about a writing desk that seems to possess the horror writer using it.

This is and extract from the bio on Phi.lip Fracassi’s website: https://pfracassi.com

PHILIP FRACASSI is the Stoker and British Fantasy-nominated author of the novels Don’t Let Them Get You Down, A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, Boys in the Valley, The Third Rule of Time Travel, and The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre.

Other work includes the story collections No One Is Safe!, Beneath a Pale Sky (named“Best Collection of the Year”by Rue Morgue Magazine and a finalist for the Bram Stoker award), and Behold the Void (named “Best Collection of the Year” by This Is Horror).

He is also the author of several novellas, including Sacculina, Shiloh, Commodore, and D7.

His short story, “Altar”, has been adapted by film studio A24 for a feature film, and his story, “Fail Safe” is being adapted for a feature film by Bad Robot, with Oscar winner Brie Larson set to star.

Philip lives in Los Angeles.