My Favorite Scary Movie

The good news: Riley finally lives somewhere quiet. The bad news: on her first night alone in Woodsboro, an unknown number asks her the question every scary movie opens with — what's your favorite? — and a masked stranger comes through her window to hear the answer in person. That My Little Pony movie was the wrong thing to say to a man with a knife. It was also, somehow, the thing that keeps her alive.

The better news is the boy who comes when she calls. Edgar Loomis is tall, courteous, suspiciously good at cleanup, and hot in a way that should genuinely be regulated. The worst news — the news Riley works out around week two and decides to keep anyway, because she has exactly the survival instincts you would expect from a girl who negotiates during home invasions — is that the masked stranger and the perfect boyfriend have the same laugh.

So begins a romance with ground rules. Edgar does not kill anyone on her block. Riley does not turn him in. They share milkshakes, argue about horror movies, and are completely disgusting about each other in public. It is the healthiest relationship in town, if you do not count the knife fight at the lake.

Then a new voice starts calling. A copycat is staging bodies in Woodsboro like film sets — placed in the light, knife left behind, timed for the front page — and building an audience while he does it. The voice on the phone knows things only family should know. Family business, it purrs. Ask him what his father taught him. The answer is waiting on Riley's staircase in a ghost mask: Vincent Loomis, the original, officially dead for eight years and tired of it, a four-generation dynasty of killers compressed into one unfailingly polite man. He is retiring. He leaves his son the field knife, the standards, and a list with one name left on it, and he invites them to Sunday dinner to hear about it.

The dinner is leg of lamb and an ambush. The mother who died twelve years ago is the one cooking it. The last name on the list is sitting at the table. By the time the plates stop moving, Edgar and Riley will have closed the family books for good — or learned that closing them was only the season finale.

Because a retirement leaves loose ends. A stranger with a year of secretly recorded tapes moves in across the street, carrying her dead father's name, his unfinished business, and a blank headstone that needs a word carved into it. A podcast host with too many leather notebooks starts digging up the town's buried story for content. And when the phone rings again — that voice, that question, that opening line that belongs to one specific family — it is going to be answered by the whole household, at once, in nine different directions.

Riley has exactly one rule left: nobody stabs her before Thanksgiving.

A complete small-town slasher romance in thirty chapters: one sarcastic final girl, one retired serial killer, a neighborhood watch that knows everything, and the wrong answer to the right question.