Count the chapters. The first section of this novel runs ten of them, unhurried, long enough to establish six friendships, one recent catastrophe and a venue. The sixth section is a single chapter and it is over in nine pages. Nothing in the text announces this. The reader simply begins to feel the floor tilting, the days arriving faster and ending harder, and that sensation is doing more work than any individual scare. Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison is a book that says most of what it means through its own architecture.
The Shape of Kiss Slay Replay
The setup is straightforward enough to summarise without spoiling anything the jacket does not. Willa Sullivan, thirty-one, drives to the Hudson Valley for the wedding of two university friends. She broke off her own engagement seven months earlier and has not recovered from it. Something goes badly wrong at the reception. She dies. She wakes up that morning, in her own bed, and the day starts again.
What she cannot do is warn anyone, because nobody else remembers. What she cannot stop doing is remembering, which turns out to be the crueller half of the arrangement. She carries forward every overheard remark, every argument, every attempt at intimacy, into versions of the day in which none of them happened. A friend voices her exhaustion with Willa through a thin cabin wall in one round; in the next, that friend is cheerful and blameless, and Willa is still wounded, and there is no available conversation that would make sense.
That is a precise piece of observation about what it is to be depressed among people who love you. The resentment has nowhere to go. Everyone else is having a nice weekend.
The venue helps enormously. Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison is set at a former children’s summer camp converted into a wedding property, all reclaimed shiplap and framed postcards and flower boxes on the porches, and the doubleness of the place does a lot of quiet work. It is a site designed for one kind of nostalgia sitting on top of another. The lake is the same lake. The cabins are the same cabins. Willa keeps being handed a version of a happy memory that belongs to somebody else, which is more or less her situation generally.
Why the Monster Keeps Changing
The genuinely unusual move in Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison is that the danger is never the same twice. Each restart brings a different threat, drawn from a different corner of the genre, and the shift from one to the next is abrupt enough to be funny before it is frightening. A reader who has seen a lot of horror will spend the book recognising the furniture and enjoying it.
The novel does eventually explain why this happens, and the explanation is the reason the book holds together rather than collapsing into a variety show. It is not arbitrary. The mechanism is tied to Willa herself, to what she is carrying and what she expects, and once that is stated the whole preceding sequence reorganises itself in the reader’s mind. Every monster she has faced was, in a sense, a self-portrait.
Harrison is direct about her intentions. Her acknowledgments name the source plainly: living with anxiety and depression, a condition she describes as feeling a great deal like a horrific loop with no visible exit. So the thesis of Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison is not a reading imposed from outside. It is the design brief. The exhaustion Willa complains of in every round, the sense that she has not slept even though she has, the dread that arrives before anything has gone wrong, the certainty that tomorrow will be a worse version of today: these are set down with the flat accuracy of someone reporting rather than imagining.
The book is also honest about the unlovely parts. Willa is self-absorbed and knows it. She keeps score. She reaches for the one person at the wedding who is guaranteed to disappoint her, and she does it more than once, and the novel neither condemns her nor pretends it is a good idea. There is a moment where she realises she is jealous of a stranger for facing catastrophe with enthusiasm instead of fear, and it is the most revealing line in the book.
Harrison is equally unsentimental about the friendships. These are people thirteen years past graduation, scattered across four states, who mean every word of the promises they make about visiting and keep almost none of them. One of them has a toddler and no reserves left. Another has been quietly absorbing Willa’s crisis for months and is close to the end of what she can give. Nobody behaves badly, exactly. They are simply tired in the particular way that early middle age makes people tired, and the horror keeps interrupting a weekend they had all been counting on.
Where Kiss Slay Replay Strains
For all its cleverness, the execution of Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison is uneven.
- The rounds are not equal. Two are superb. One exists mainly to raise the stakes and is finished almost before it starts.
- The rules arrive as a lecture. A long explanatory conversation delivers the physics wholesale, and though the character giving it is a welcome surprise, the scene stops the novel dead.
- The romantic subplot is deliberately hollow, which is defensible and still costs the book pace. Willa learns the same lesson about the same man three separate times.
- A few beats simply repeat. Repetition is the form, but not every recurrence is varied, and the reader notices the ones that are only recycled.
Readers who want more of the register that makes Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison work should go to Play Nice, her previous novel, in which a circle of old friends turns on itself under similar pressure, or So Thirsty, which hides a friendship autopsy inside a monster story. When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy, whom Harrison thanks as an early reader here, shares the willingness to be very funny and very brutal in the same paragraph, and How to Survive a Horror Story by Mallory Arnold is the closest thing on the shelf to this book’s genre-aware humour. On content: sustained graphic violence including repeated eye trauma, multiple on-page deaths of named characters, animal injury, panic attacks, passive suicidal ideation and two explicit scenes.
Final Thoughts
There is a version of Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison that is only a gimmick, and Harrison gets close enough to it that the reader can see the drop. What saves it is that the way out of the loop is not a puzzle. It is a decision, and it is the least dramatic thing in the book: a woman deciding she wants the rest of her life, uncertain and unglamorous as it looks, more than she fears it. She makes that decision while being chased, filthy and bleeding, having achieved nothing except staying alive long enough to want something. Seven novels in, Harrison has got very good at hiding an ordinary human problem inside an extremely silly monster and then declining, at the last moment, to be silly about it.