How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates

**Author:** Shailee Thompson

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The collision between horror and romance, the scripts we are handed and the ones we write for ourselves, and what it means to be cast as both victim and heroine in someone else's fantasy.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love slasher films and romantic comedies in equal measure, anyone who has ever felt like a supporting character in their own life, and those who appreciate a story that understands both the terror and the absurdity of being desired.

Jamie Prescott has spent years studying the strange kinship between two genres that should have nothing in common. Her doctoral dissertation argues that slasher films and romantic comedies share the same DNA: both depend on timing, both punish certain kinds of people while rewarding others, and both end with a final girl or a leading lady standing in the wreckage of everyone else's bad decisions. She knows the rules intimately. She can predict the beats. She has watched the masked killer and the charming suitor walk the same narrative paths so many times that the lines between them have begun to blur. Then her best friend Laurie drags her to a speed-dating event at a converted Brooklyn warehouse, and Jamie's academic theories become terrifyingly literal. What begins as an evening of awkward small talk and lukewarm cocktails transforms, in the space of a single blackout, into a massacre. Four people die in seconds. The doors lock. The phones are gone. And somewhere in the building, a killer wearing a pink ski mask with heart-shaped eye holes has decided that Jamie is not a victim. She is the prize. This novel exists at the precise intersection where horror and romance bleed into each other, and that is not an accident. Shailee Thompson has built the entire architecture of the story on Jamie's own thesis: that the difference between a romantic gesture and a threat is often only a matter of who is performing it and whether the recipient has consented to the role. The book asks what happens when a woman who has spent her life analyzing these stories suddenly finds herself trapped inside one, with no script, no director, and no guarantee that the ending will be a happy one. The tone is deliberately, sometimes jarringly, dual. One moment Jamie is cracking jokes about serial killers with jazz hands, the next she is hiding under a table clutching a broken Kahlúa bottle while a man bleeds out across from her. Thompson refuses to let the reader settle into either pure horror or pure comedy. The result is a reading experience that mirrors Jamie's own disorientation: you will laugh…