In the well-worn landscape of slasher fiction, the victims are almost always wide-eyed teenagers with lives to live and lessons to learn. But in The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, Philip Fracassi flips that formula, running it through a Bingo machine to deliver a delightfully twisted, emotionally grounded take on the genre — with a final girl who’s golden in every sense of the word. High school hallways are swapped for beige corridors and chess championships, and the threat of finding yourself trapped in a place where death is never a stranger feels, surprisingly, all the more unnerving for it.
The story centers primarily on Rose DuBois, a sharp-witted, resolutely independent force of nature living out her days at the Autumn Springs Retirement Home, battling the creeping indignities of old age. When one resident is found dead in her apartment, it’s shrugged off as just another inevitable part of life there. But when more bodies start turning up, Rose and her friend Miller sense something’s amiss. They set out to uncover the truth, only to realize they might be the next victims of a killer who’s hiding in plain sight.
What makes Fracassi’s latest novel so effective is his ability to balance genre thrills and chills with emotional depth. He populates the murder-plagued residence with a cast of richly drawn characters who never slip into cliché or serve as simple comic relief. They’re complex, fully realized pensioners — eccentric, stubborn, and undeniably human. The youthful chaos typical of slasher fiction is still there, but just with walkers and whiskey replacing keg parties and screaming teens. The residents all flirt, bicker, drink, and party, but they also grieve, reflect, and confront fear with an emotional honesty that keeps the story grounded. Throughout it all, Fracassi cleverly keeps the humor from undermining the horror, and vice versa, allowing the two to play off each other in ways that sharpen both the tension and the emotional weight.
At the same time Fracassi doesn’t skimp on the genre thrills. The kills — some darkly comic, others shockingly sad — are cleverly tailored to the age and environment of the characters in the story. There’s a sickly sense of inevitability at play: Yes, they are old. Yes, death is close — but murder? That changes everything. The author captures the eerie, awful in-between space where characters must confront their own mortality while desperately fighting to hold on a little longer. It’s a brilliant contradiction: a setting where death is expected — even a friend in some ways — transformed into a claustrophobic deathtrap. This claustrophobia is heightened by the fact that the home offers no easy escape when bingo night goes sideways: families have made other plans so can’t take their parents in until the horror blows over, or the residents refuse to be a burden on their families. That subtle tension — between acceptance and entrapment — gives the novel a stronger sense of helplessness than most slashers manage to reach.
If I had to place The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre on a literary family tree, imagine Agatha Christie writing a whodunnit after reading Joe R. Lansdale’s Bubba Ho-Tep and Mark Billingham’s Rabbit Hole, and you get the idea: a classic murder mystery filtered through a lens of creeping institutional dread and gallows humor. At its best, the novel is both a suspenseful whodunit and a poignant meditation on what it really means to be put out to pasture. Fracassi’s keen control captures the rhythms of regret and resilience that accompany old age, and it’s this emotional depth that elevates the book far above your average genre outing.
Ultimately, this is a book about dignity in the face of horror — both the mundane, slow kind and the knife-wielding-in-the-dark kind. It’s as much a love letter to the elderly as it is a blood-streaked homage to the slasher genre. And in Rose DuBois, Fracassi has created a Final Golden Girl whose strength, fear, and tenacity make her every bit as compelling as any Scream Queen who has come before her.
While it appropriately avoids overpreachy allegories amid its slasher shenanigans, the novel still gets the reader thinking in ways this sub-genre seldom does—about aging, community, and the often fraught systems we rely on to care for our elders. More impressively, it navigates these themes with a deft hand—alternately cheeky and deeply moving—offering a finely tuned, bittersweet meditation on what it means to confront death on one’s own terms.
VERDICT:
The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, by Philip Fracassi, publishes on September 30, 2025.
