Title: Our Dead Girlfriend: Author's Enhanced EditionAuthor: Jon Athan
First Published: February 27, 2025
Publisher: Self-Published
Pages: 219
Genre: Horror, Splatterpunk
Format: Ebook
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Rating:
Synopsis:
While walking through the woods, a group of boys—Daniel Burke, Gavin Graves, and brothers Connor and Tyler Parker—discover the abandoned body of a female high school student. The body is bruised but clean, lifeless but fresh. Torn between fear and fascination, the boys decide to keep the corpse hidden in a ditch in the woods in order to keep her as their girlfriend—to converse with her, to flirt, to practice, to love.
What follows is a story of adolescence, friendship, love, envy, hatred, and extreme horror.
Jon Athan, the author of Are Your Parents Home? and The Groomer, brings you a disturbing tale of 'young love' and human horror. Could you ever love a dead body?
Rewritten and re-edited from the ground up, the 2025 Author’s Enhanced Edition of this novel is an uncut, uncensored, and extended version of the original story. It is the definitive ‘Our Dead Girlfriend’ experience.
WARNING: This book contains graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.
Buy the Book: AmazonReview
Our Dead Girlfriend is a near perfect coming-of-age horror story. Four tween boys find the body of a high school girl in the woods. She’s lifeless sure, but she’s still fresh, she’s still beautiful. Shocked, horrified, curious, they ultimately agree to make the girl their “practice girlfriend.” A girl they can talk to without fear of rejection, to look at, to touch, to practice “love.”
The premise alone is deeply disturbing, and it goes without saying that this novel touches on taboo topics. Jon Athan navigates this masterfully with outstanding writing and nuanced characters. Family relationships and age play a role in each boy’s moral compass, and each boy was a foil for the others.
The story was heartbreakingly tragic but also engaging, I felt compelled to keep reading even through the more difficult parts. I had extremely mixed feelings about the final two chapters. While a specific character was fascinating and I want to read more about them, I felt overall that the ending doesn’t have the emotional payoff to match the depth of the rest of the story.
Although this book was originally written in 2018 it’s more relevant than ever. You don’t have to look far to find headlines about male loneliness and a troubling rise in youth relational violence. For that I’m glad that Jon Athan selected this story to rewrite from the ground up while keeping the outline of the story intact. It’s an outstanding book that gave me a lot to think about.
Quote
“Please don’t take her from me. Plee-Please. She’s all I have. I don’t care if I get in trouble, but if you tell anyone… I’ll be all alone again… I want to-to… to pretend like someone actually cares about me. Please don’t tell anyone about this. I’ll beg you if you want me to, just don’t… don’t take this from me.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Authors
About Jon Athan
Jon Athan is an author from California. Jon was born on September 12, 1992 during a stormy night. As a child, he enjoyed writing and telling scary short stories. Some of these stories got him into some serious trouble with his teachers, but he persevered through the detentions and therapy sessions.
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