Kristin's Bookshelf

📖 Red Remains
✍️ Abbi I. Draper
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The concept of friendship and love becomes beautifully twisted in Abbi I. Draper’s “Red Remains.”

When a strange, ghost-like presence gives a girl a gift on her fourteenth birthday, she welcomes the attention. As Roald learns to communicate with her, his feelings grow stronger… but often at the expense of everyone else in her life. His possessiveness, jealousy, and need for control slowly consume her world until Roald becomes the only relationship that seems to matter. And the girl doesn’t fully understand what is happening around her until there is almost nothing left.

Draper has a knack for creating visuals through poetic language and vivid, sometimes haunting details. There was a constant stream of images playing through my mind as I read, which worked especially well for such a short and atmospheric story.

I haven’t read many horror novelettes, and “Red Remains” was a perfect introduction to the format. At its heart, this is a story about love and love lost, but it’s also about what happens when love becomes consuming, possessive, and almost parasitic. There’s something especially unsettling about watching the girl’s world shrink as Roald takes up more and more space within it.

I also love knowing Draper used this story as a way to transform some of her own darker and intrusive thoughts into something creative. The result is beautiful, strange, sad, and deeply haunted.