Books Teen Horror Time Machine Dearly Departed: The Dead Girlfriend and Guilty  By Alissa Burger | Published on February 5, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share The characters in teen horror novels are constantly breaking up, making up, and swapping partners, with lots of high tension drama, hurt feelings, and elaborate revenge plots. In R.L. Stine’s standalone book The Dead Girlfriend (1993) and Diane Hoh’s Nightmare Hall book Guilty (also 1993), there’s the added complication of death, which presents a dangerous combination of intrigue, suspicion, danger, and grief.  In Stine’s The Dead Girlfriend, Annie Kiernan and her family have just relocated to the small town of Shocklin Falls, where her parents have taken jobs at the local community college. They moved in early May, so Annie is stuck finishing out the year in a new school, where she makes friends and enemies alike. But first, while going for a bike ride around her new town up to a cliff overlooking the local falls, she meets Jonathan Morgan. Dark, brooding, and handsome, he stands at the edge of the drop off, staring intently down, and Annie’s first thought is that he plans to jump. She screams, making a memorable first impression, but he makes just as big of an impression on her, with Annie reflecting “I think I fell in love with him then. Or something like that. I’m not sure. It’s impossible to explain” (8-9). Jonathan tells her he had no intention of jumping, laughing off the very suggestion. It appears that he has been stood up by a friend who was supposed to meet him there, but he’s plenty happy to hang out with Annie instead, which promises to be a pleasant adventure … until she goes to grab her bike and finds that someone has slashed both tires in the few minutes she has been talking with Jonathan. He walks her—and her disabled bike—home and asks her to be his date to a party on Friday night, and all seems to be doing pretty well for Annie’s first afternoon in Shocklin Falls, until a mysterious girl named Ruby catches up with them, cryptically tells Annie “Watch out for Jonathan […] Really. He’s dangerous. A real dangerous guy” (21), then pedals away.  Annie runs through a series of possible explanations in her mind: maybe Ruby and Jonathan are frenemies, or Ruby is a potential romantic rival for Jonathan’s attention, or the girl just has a weird sense of humor. Whatever it is, Annie shrugs it off, embraces her new life in Shocklin Falls, and heads out on her Friday night date with no serious reservations. At the party, Annie meets lots of new people, including Jonathan’s best friend Caleb, whose idea of a good time is to climb the fence surrounding the local batting cages and pretend he’s a monkey, and Caleb’s horrified and long-suffering girlfriend, Dawn. While Caleb is a bit much and Annie can’t get a read on exactly what Jonathan and Ruby’s relationship is—sometimes they seem to really dislike each other, other times they sneak off into dark corners to have what look like pretty intimate conversations—Dawn really takes Annie under her wing, helping her get acclimated to her new school and their friend group.  Dawn’s the one who tells Annie about Jonathan’s former girlfriend, Louisa. There’s a memorial display of Louisa at school, featuring “a photo of a pretty girl. She had all-American good looks. Bright blonde hair. Flashing blue eyes. High cheekbones like a model. A beautiful smile revealing perfect white teeth” (53). Louisa’s death is shrouded in mystery and this uncertainty seems to be at the heart of the warnings Annie has heard about Jonathan: Louisa and Jonathan had gone for a bike ride and were at the falls when she died, and no one knows exactly what happened. Jonathan told people that he thought he saw someone on the path, went to check it out, and when he came back, Louisa was nowhere to be seen. When he looked over the falls, “he saw her bike. Down below. All mangled. It had caught on the rocks […] They dragged her body out downriver […] Two days later” (60). It could have been an accident, foul play, or suicide, and while just about everyone who knew Louisa has pretty strong feelings about what they think happened, no one knows for sure.  Tensions build and despite her reservations, Annie finds herself unable to resist Jonathan. But someone else seems to be trying just as hard to keep Annie and Jonathan apart, orchestrating “accidents” to frighten Annie and take her out of the picture. Someone sabotages her research project file, deleting all of her notes and replacing them with a clear warning: “STAY AWAY FROM JONATHAN. IT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE” (71). She gets threatening phone calls with similar whispered warnings. The school computer Annie habitually uses is rigged to electrocute her when she touches the keyboard. When Annie has a birthday party at her house, someone horrifically murders her poor cat, who is adorably named Goggles. And Jonathan’s behavior becomes increasingly troubling, including another bike ride to the falls (which you would think he wouldn’t be quite so anxious to return to time and again), where he takes off in a panic, leaving Annie behind.  The falls are at the heart of the mystery and are also where the truth is revealed, though it comes out in layers. Annie finally broaches the topic of Louisa’s death with Jonathan, figuring that it can help her solve the mystery of who is trying to scare her away from him. She is sensitive to his silence, assuming that his reluctance to talk about Louisa comes from grief and pain, as she notes that “You’ve never talked about Louisa once […] You have to tell me the whole story about Louisa. I know you cared about her so much” (161). But it turns out this couldn’t be further from the truth and Jonathan explodes, screaming “Are you crazy, Annie? […] I hated Louisa! I hated her so much, I killed her” (161, emphasis original). At first glance, this seems like a pretty straightforward confession, but it’s really just hyperbolic angst and Jonathan quickly goes on to clarify that he didn’t push Louisa, but he blames himself for her death because “If I hadn’t brought Louisa here, she wouldn’t have died” (164), which really isn’t anything close to the same thing.  There’s more to his feelings of guilt though, because while he was dating Louisa, Jonathan and Ruby were also seeing each other, and he planned to break up with Louisa so that he and Ruby could be together. While everyone thinks Jonathan and Louisa were alone at the falls on the day Louisa died, Ruby was there too, and Louisa went over the falls when he left the two girls alone together for a couple of minutes. This brings the mysteriously complicated relationship between Jonathan and Ruby into clearer focus, as Jonathan confesses to Annie that “After Ruby killed Louisa, I was sick. I couldn’t stand the sight of Ruby. She kept trying to get me to go out with her. But I felt so guilty. So horribly guilty. I didn’t want to even talk to Ruby again. But she kept following me. She would never leave me alone” (167, emphasis original). Ruby followed Jonathan and Annie to the falls and when he identifies her as the murderer, she emerges from the woods screaming, with her face “twisted in a frightening expression of pure rage” (165), repeatedly calling Jonathan a liar. Jonathan and Ruby’s altercation becomes physical and in the struggle, Ruby falls over the edge of the falls and while Annie had felt brief certainty that Jonathan wasn’t a murderer, it seems like he is now and if he wants to keep that secret, Annie has to go too.  When Annie goes to flee, it’s friendly, reliable Dawn to the rescue … except this salvation is just another bait-and-switch. Dawn has been constructing a narrative, positioning herself as beyond suspicion of being interested in Jonathan by dating Caleb, which allows her to be in Jonathan’s orbit without being identifiable as one of the many girls vying for his affections. And she’s figured out the next step of her narrative construction as well, one in which Annie is both murderer and victim, and she and Jonathan can finally be together (whether he likes it or not). As Dawn lays out this sequence of events, “I saw Annie push Ruby over the cliff” (175). After that, she tells Jonathan, “Then […] Annie tried to push you over the side. But Annie slipped, and she accidentally fell herself” (175). Dawn is going to eliminate the competition, cover for Jonathan killing Ruby, and in return, he’ll have to love her. (How Caleb factors into this equation is a bit of a mystery, but Dawn sees him as collateral damage, entirely disposable, whether that means breaking up with him or pushing him over the cliff too). Thankfully, it doesn’t come to that—Ruby DIDN’T fall to her death, she summoned the police, and they come rushing to the rescue. After giving their police statements, Annie and Jonathan are right back to happily dating … actually, even happier, now that no one is receiving death threats.  Jonathan’s grief process (or lack thereof) is a point of speculation and misunderstanding in The Dead Girlfriend, but mourning is a central focus of Hoh’s Guilty, in which Kit Sullivan has to figure out how to move on and cope with the tragic death of her boyfriend Robert Brown, who everyone calls Brownie. Kit and Brownie met during freshmen orientation in a very “opposites attract” dynamic: a shy girl meeting a life-of-the-party guy. They have a strong and close-knit friend group, including Brownie’s sister Callie, Kit’s high school friend Allen, and her roommate LuAnn, and Brownie’s new friend Davis. Much like Jonathan and Louisa, no one knows exactly what happened when Brownie died because he and Kit were the only ones who were there: they took a canoe out on the river near campus, but the current was stronger than they were prepared for, the canoe capsized, and while Brownie got Kit to the shore and safety, he was swept back into the current and died. But in this case, no one blames Kit except for Kit herself, who struggles with survivor’s guilt and goes to great lengths to try to outrun her feelings of grief and responsibility.  For starters, she changes her name: Kit is short for Katherine and after Brownie’s death, she starts going by Katie instead. This is intended to be a clear and self-defining break between her pre- and post-trauma life, though it is a bit of an uphill battle. Allen, who has been her friend since they were in high school, has always known her as Kit, though he seems to go along with whatever will make her happy. When Katie’s roommate LuAnn slips up and calls Katie by the wrong name, Katie quickly and brusquely corrects her, saying “I told you not to call me that […] I told all of you. If you don’t call me Katie, I’m not going to answer you” (21, emphasis original). What’s more, Katie’s new name comes with some big personality changes as well: while Kit had been reserved and responsible, Katie is much more spontaneous and a bigger risk taker. She dances in the fountain in the quad, blows off homework to go to parties, climbs the rickety fire escape at Nightmare Hall, and breaks into the gym to go swimming in the university pool after hours. Brownie was the life of the party and in some ways, it seems like Katie may be trying to step into his role as a way of keeping him alive and close, but she is also doing all she can to avoid having to cope with her complicated feelings of grief and responsibility.  All of Katie’s friends reassure her that Brownie’s death was an accident and that no one blames her, but this comfort is complicated when someone begins harassing and threatening Katie. Things go missing from her room and someone writes “GUILTY” (27) in the dust on the hood of her car when she and her friends are at the movies. After she climbs in the window at the top of Nightmare Hall’s fire escape, she is looking around in a closet when she hits her head on a beam and is knocked unconscious; when she comes to, she has been zipped into an industrial-strength garment bag where she is slowly suffocating and has to fight her way out. While she’s swimming in the empty pool, someone grabs her from under the water and pulls her down, nearly drowning her. She starts hearing Brownie’s voice, first in her dorm room, saying “It’s all your fault” (42, emphasis original) and later, singing “Happy Birthday” in an empty room at Nightmare Hall where the friends have gathered for a birthday party. Katie finds herself fighting for her life while trying to figure out which of her friends might secretly blame her for Brownie’s death. To make matters worse, given her recent erratic behavior, her friends are quick to dismiss Katie’s fears, telling her she’s imagining things, overreacting, or just making things up. Katie struggles with these responses and ultimately blames herself, asking herself “Why couldn’t people take her seriously? Okay, so she hadn’t been acting like the kind of person people took seriously, since … since that day on the river. She’d give them that” (106, emphasis original).  Much like in The Dead Girlfriend, there’s a whole lot more going on than meets that eye and the truth must be revealed one layer at a time. Brownie’s sister Callie seems the most likely to be devastated enough to seek revenge for Brownie’s death, and to some degree, she did. Brownie’s ghostly voice came from a tape recorder, with the audio content coming from the family’s home answering machine following an altercation about their parents’ car and a birthday message Brownie had sent Callie the previous year. Callie hid in Katie’s room and in Nightmare Hall with the tape recorder, playing Brownie’s voice to torment Katie. Callie wanted some measure of revenge, telling Katie “It’s your fault my brother’s dead … he’s gone … gone … I’ll never see him again, and it’s your fault. But nothing ever happened to you! You weren’t punished. You just walked away. Somebody had to do something. So I did it, and I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all” (136-7, emphasis original). Callie wanted to make Katie pay and when this truth comes out, Katie is devastated, but also somewhat relieved … until it turns out that Callie was behind some of the terrifying occurrences, but not all of them. She didn’t write “GUILTY” on Katie’s car, she didn’t attack her in the attic in Nightmare Hall, and she didn’t try to drown her, so presumably there are (at least) two people out to get Katie. As Callie explains, “I was trying to punish you, not scare you” (140) and while it takes some time and thought for Katie to come to terms with what Callie’s saying, she ultimately has to accept that Callie is not the attempted murderer. The motivation becomes even more complicated when it turns out that Brownie didn’t drown in the river: his death was the result of a head wound, which everyone thinks he sustained when he crashed into a rock while being swept along by the current. This is a game-changer for Katie and her overwhelming sense of guilt, because her assumption has been that he didn’t have the strength to get back to shore because he spent it all saving her and couldn’t keep afloat. Once she knows he was hit in the head and likely knocked unconscious, she is able to accept that it really was just a terrible accident … except that of course, it wasn’t. There was a collision between Brownie’s head and a rock, but it was the result of someone intentionally hitting him in the head after he had fought his way to shore, then pushing his body back into the fast-moving current. Katie begins to suspect Brownie’s friend Davis when she discovers that Davis has a picture of her and Brownie. As far as Katie knows, there were only two copies of that particular picture: she has one and Brownie had the other in his wallet the day he went in the river, though when his wallet is recovered, the picture is missing. In the aftermath of Brownie’s death, Davis has been supportive, understanding, and as the weeks go by, expressing a romantic interest in Katie, which just might be a motive.  But again, this is only part of the story. When Katie goes to Allen’s room to talk to him, she finds the room empty and when she opens her closet door to borrow a sweater, she finds another copy of the picture (which apparently everybody has). But Allen’s copy is a little different: “A giant blowup of the picture of Brownie and Katie, smiling at each other … Katie’s own smiling, happy face, bigger than life, was staring back at her from the closet wall [… but] where Brownie’s dark brown eyes and curly hair and devilish grin should have been, Allen’s thin, serious face had been pasted into place” (160, emphasis original).  Apparently, everyone loves Katie, but Allen feels particularly proprietary in his affections, since he’s loved her the longest and he loved her when she was Kit. When Allen discovers Katie in his room, he tells her that Kit “was supposed to be with me when we got to college. Everyone knew that. My parent’s, Kit’s parents, our friends … maybe we were just pals in high school, but I knew it would be different when we got to college […] no more high school stuff … and I was sure she’d see me differently away from home. I figured she’d finally be ready to admit that we belonged together. Forever” (166). Katie flounders for a moment, uncertain “why he was talking about her in the third person. He kept saying, ‘Kit.’ But she was Kit” (166-7, emphasis original). Switching from Kit to Katie may have been her way of claiming ownership and agency of herself and her experience in a traumatic time, redefining herself by changing her name, but for Allen, this renaming has become something more akin to dissociation. As far as he is concerned, Kit and Katie are two different people, with two different personalities, and while he’s not even a bit sad that Brownie is dead, he can’t forgive Katie for killing Kit. That’s the murder for which he has decided Katie is guilty (as he wrote on her car) and that’s why she has to die.  When push comes to shove—almost literally, as Allen gets ready to force Katie off an old bridge over the river that nearly killed her once already—Katie saves herself by channeling Kit. She plays up the helpless girl he became obsessed with: “‘I can’t move,’ Katie said breathlessly, changing her voice, returning to Kit’s soft, unsure quality. ‘Allen, I can’t move!” She didn’t have to fake the terror in her words” (183). Hoh highlights the complexity of Katie’s identity negotiation, synthesizing components of these different parts of Katie’s past and present in the way she uses both names, all while keeping Katie firmly in control, foregrounding her strength and ingenuity. Katie plays into Allen’s desire to control and rescue her, drawing on a selective library of their shared memories to position him as her knight in shining armor, which allows her to save herself. When he sees through her performance, he tries to push her in the river, though by then he’s close enough that she can take him down with her. While Katie was terrified of the water the first time she found herself there, relying on Brownie to save her, this second time around, she saves herself. After she hit the water, “she began swimming frantically toward shore. The water was shallower now, quieter than it had been when the canoe had overturned. That seemed a million years ago now, another time, another place. She had been so frightened to find herself in the river. Paralyzed by fear, panicked into helplessness […] Not this time. There was no one here now, no one to help her but herself. Katie had to save Katie” (190, emphasis original). And she does. Davis and Callie are waiting for her on shore and when Katie disappeared, they put the pieces together and called the cops, who are ready to take Allen (who also survived the fall and the water) into custody. But Katie didn’t have to be rescued, she didn’t have to be pulled from the water, and she no longer has to doubt whether or not she has what it takes to fight and survive.  In both The Dead Girlfriend and Guilty, the protagonists’ deceased romantic partners are just one piece of the puzzle. Louisa and Brownie’s deaths cast long shadows over Jonathan and Katie, both in how they cope with that loss and in how others see them. But neither of those deaths are what they seem to be, with conflicting motives and narratives going on beneath the surface of which neither protagonist is aware. Dawn is certain that she and Jonathan belong together, while Allen has no doubt that he and Kit are meant to be, but these “love stories” are tales of obsession and fixation, one-way desires that remain invisible and unspoken even as they destroy the lives of those around them. In the end, it’s not so much the dead boyfriends and girlfriends that are the true horrors, but the rivals disguised as friends who made them that way.[end-mark] The post Dearly Departed: <em>The Dead Girlfriend</em> and <em>Guilty</em>  appeared first on Reactor.