Synopsis:
Brimming with dark humor, violence, and mystery, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre is a blood-soaked slasher sure to keep readers cringing, laughing, and guessing until the very last page.
Rose DuBois is not your average final girl.
Rose is in her late 70s, living out her golden years at the Autumn Springs Retirement Home.
When one of her friends dies alone in her apartment, Rose isn’t too concerned. Accidents happen, especially at this age!
Then another resident drops dead. And another. With bodies stacking up, Rose can’t help but wonder: are these accidents? Old age? Or something far more sinister?
Together with her best friend Miller, Rose begins to investigate. The further she digs, the more convinced she becomes: there’s a killer on the loose at Autumn Springs, and if she isn’t careful, Rose may be their next victim.
Review:
With a tight narrative that turns the slasher story on its head, Philip Fracassi scores high marks, making The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre one of my top books of 2025 so far.
So most of us are familiar with a slasher movie — a specific type of horror flick popularized in the 80’s thanks to Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Friday the 13th. The villains are often more iconic than the victims and survivors (Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Jason), but if there is an exception to that rule, it’s the “Final Girl.” Final girls are typically the last survivor in the book or movie, many times defeating the slasher in the process.
Now, when you think of a slasher movie, the average age of the cast is probably under 30 years old. Here, Fracassi flips it completely and makes some interesting social commentary in the process by making nearly all the victims in The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre…well…OLD.
It’s played as a talking point a few different times in the book, especially with the first few victims, that…well, they were old anyway and we’re probably knocking on death’s door to begin with. Now, Fracassi’s killer was strategic and smart, electing to use brute force to look like accidents, poisoning to look like heart attacks, and other clever methods to avoid detection for the first half of the book. I suppose in that case, perhaps it isn’t a pure slasher tale, but when it’s clear that the deaths are murders, the killer gives up the pretense of accidental deaths and brings out a level of brutality to the deaths.
Our protagonist is Rose DuBois, who is nearing 80 years old. Unlike many of her fellow residents at the retirement home, her daughter would actually like her to leave and come live with her. But Rose wants to maintain her own independence, so when the chance comes to leave, she stays, in many ways to help find the killer.
It would have been easy for Fracassi to simply make all the victims just old and weak and stop there. But the color and flavor of this book is found in Rose’s friends. We’re immediately introduced to Gopi, a film-lover who gathers many of the residents together regularly to show them forgotten silver screen gems. Then there’s Bridget, Barbara, and Betsie — three sisters who live in the same apartment to save money and are suspected of being witches by the residents. And Rose’s longtime beau (but not husband – she’s way too independent to get married again!) Beauregard Mason Miller, just known as Miller, is a constant companion.
But by far, the character I loved the most (and who broke my heart), was Tatum Bird, a man riddled with dementia who sits all day on a bench by a pond, waiting for his dog to come back – a dog who has been dead for over a decade.
Fracassi noted in the Afterwards that both of his parents passed away while he was working on this book, and I think it shows in the care he put into the characters. He made each and every retiree into a person with different wants and desires. They weren’t just old people sitting in their rooms waiting to die — they had friends and hopes for the future, while fully acknowledging that their future was more limited than most other people.
There was a chapter about two-thirds of the way through the book that was simply heartbreaking after it was clear that something was wrong at Autumn Springs where many of the residents tried to leave and simply spend some time with their sons or daughters, only to be rebuffed and forgotten.
Simply put, with The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, Philip Fracassi weaved a taut thriller with memorable characters while also making a heartfelt statement about the care and condition of the elderly in the United States today. I heartily recommend this book and will be looking to read more Fracassi in the future.
Thank you to Tor Nightfire for providing a physical book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
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