“Blair bit her lip, fighting back a snarl. Enough was enough. She couldn’t stand it any longer. She reached for Nicki’s ponytail, pretending to remove a piece of lint from the shiny blond strands. Then, with a sharp yank on the gold chain around Nicki’s neck, she crushed the girl’s windpipe before ramming the ridiculous crystal icicle pendant through her yellow Ralph Lauren turtleneck and into her jugular.”
—Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer, by Cecily Von Ziegesar, 2011
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner once famously observed, and surely he was referring to our current cultural moment: Hilary Duff tickets are reselling for $1000 on StubHub, 7 for All Mankind (scientifically determined to be the most Fergalicious of all jeans brands) are launching a comeback, and three weeks ago, this news dropped:
It’s actually not even the only “your childhood favorite it now a boring adult, just like you!” novel announced in the last 3 weeks:
Of course, there’s nothing too unusual about either of these. Recall The Carrie Diaries, the 2010 book (and then TV) series that dared to ask, “what if Sex and the City, the show that introduced America at large to concepts like golden showers and waxing all the hair off your vagina, was rewritten for tweens?” In the opposite direction, there’s Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later, the 2011 Sweet Valley High sequel novel that imagined teen queen bees Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield as dull, 30-something drips. The fact that there is no Babysitters Club sequel series where Kristy is running a childcare collective in Park Slope and Stacy is a cancelled girlboss is a true testament to the ethics of Ann M. Martin.
But the Gossip Girl sequel caught my eye. Not because I love Gossip Girl — although I do love Gossip Girl. Rather, I was intrigued by the idea of this IP exercise because in 2011, Gossip Girl pulled off one of the strangest and most fascinating reimaginings ever, one that didn’t necessarily feel remarkable at the time, but stands out as an amazing cultural oddity now: Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer.
Literally Just a (Murder) Girl
Before it became a hit TV show about bitchy rich kids running amok in New York City, Gossip Girl was a YA book series about bitchy rich kids running amok in New York City, with the first volume debuting in 2002. In 2008, author Cecily von Ziegesar told the Telegraph UK that the series was inspired by her own childhood among beautiful and vicious rich girls at NYC’s Nightingale-Bamford School:
“Back in my days as a children’s book editor, my superiors caught on to the fact that teenagers were using the internet to gossip about each other, and thought it might be nifty to develop a series of books about an anonymous high-school blogger who gossips about her classmates…I sat at my desk and stared at the teen-centric books I had read or edited myself thus far - girly series about teenagers living in fictional suburban towns…Nice girls who won the cute boy in the end and mean girls who were punished…Girls I never related to. I decided that, if I were to write a teen series, I’d want to set it in a place that was familiar to me - Manhattan, where I’d grown up - and I’d model the characters on myself and my friends.”
I’m far too old to have been in the right demo for these books (I was 20 when Gossip Girl #1 came out, a time when I spent most of my energy trying and failing to pull off a fashion mullet1), but I have read the first few novels, and they are fucking fun. Smart, funny, cunty and perceptive, they’re dispatches from an ancient past when teen culture was designed to be sleek and nasty and wildly entertaining (see also: Jawbreaker and the first few Pretty Little Liars novels).
And in all their thoughtless luxury consumption and casual cruelty, the gossiping girls of Gossip Girl do bear more than a passing resemblance to Patrick Bateman, who in 2002 was only at the beginning of his ascendancy to cult film icon.
But even given all that — and given the long-running pop culture trope of homicidal high schoolers that can be found everywhere from 1976’s dual releases of Carrie and Massacre at Central High (said to be an uncredited inspiration for Heathers) to 2017’s Tragedy Girls — creating a book in which the series’ glam heroines, Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf, become ultra-violent murderers who stab, strangle and squirrel-poison the citizens of the Upper East Side was, uh, not an obvious career move.
In Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer — a mash-up of Gossip Girl #1 and gothy serial killer fiction — sexy bad girl Serena has no longer been sent to boarding school for being too sexy; instead, she is a sexy psychotic killer who was sent to boarding school for doing too many murders at home (and then sent home from boarding school for doing too many murders at school). The ever-tightly wound Blair remains tightly wound — she’s just also now brandishing a dagger, too. The school’s wealthy bimbos organize a fundraiser with a “Kiss Me or Die” theme. Aspiring filmmaker Vanessa is shooting a gender-swapped version of Natural Born Killers for a film class. Vultures circle over Central Park. And in her classic opening spiel, Gossip Girl welcomes readers to “New York City’s Upper East Side, where my friends and I live, go to school, and play — and sometimes kill each other.”
Why would an incredibly popular line of soapy teen books decide to end its run with a book-length parody of its first volume, a bizarre and blood-soaked finale that definitely turned off its core audience (on Goodreads, it has 2,348 reviews; in contrast, the actual first volume of Gossip Girl has 70,906 ratings)?
I don’t think the roots of its creation lie with American Psycho, Heathers, or a bad case of ergot poisoning down at the YA publishing house. Rather, the answer to this cultural riddle can be found in a wildly popular book that you absolutely forgot existed: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a zombie in possession of brains, must be in want of more brains”
Apologies to any young people reading this; I know the world must be hard enough for you and I don’t want to rub the quality of life that millennials once enjoyed in your face. But this is what things used to be like: someone would come up with a phrase like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and enough people would be like, “Huh, good phrase!” that eventually, they’d just publish a book about it.
Seriously! Editor Jason Rekulak (now a successful thriller author himself) “had had this sort of long-gestating idea of doing some kind of mashup,” Pride and Prejudice and Zombies author Seth Grahame-Smith told Time in 2009:
“He had these lists, and on one side he had a column of War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights and whatever public domain classic literature you can think of. And on the other side he would have these phenomena like werewolves and pirates and zombies and vampires. He called me one day, out of the blue, very excitedly, and he said, all I have is this title, and I can’t stop thinking about this title. And he said: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. For whatever reason, it just struck me as the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard.”
The book retains the majority of Austen’s original text, but inserted alongside is a subplot in which the Bennet sisters are martial artists who are constantly battling the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse. Why not! Back then, only your most dementedly tech-addicted friends had smartphones. Nyan Cat had not even been invented yet. We needed something to fill our time.
So we bought copies of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 2 million copies, in fact — a phenomenon that spawned a 2016 feature film, and lesser-remembered public domain/ sci-fi mash-up titles like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina.
And eventually, Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer.
Qu’est-ce que c’est, Upper East Siders?
“Kati pulled open the heavy metal door and they began to stuff the duvet into the chute. Just then, Serena appeared with a bottle of Absolut Pepper vodka and a flaming tiki torch in her hands. She doused their hair and faces with pepper-flavored vodka. Blinded, Kati and Isabel fell on their hands and knees, moaning. Serena tossed in the torch and the two girls became a giant, flaming flambe. Their eyelashes and hair crackled and shriveled. Their skin blistered and smoked. Their clothes seemed to swell and then pucker and shrink as they burned.” —once again, Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer, by Cecily Von Ziegesar, 2011
Shortly before the book’s release, Von Ziegesar told Entertainment Weekly that editors asked her to write a genre mash-up of her own novel. She told them her only ground rules were “No zombies, no vampires.”
Instead, she revised the first Gossip Girl book much in the same way Grahame-Smith revised Austen: she kept most of the original text, but added a subplot in which the heroines’ teen angst bullshit has a bodycount.
Lest you think I am a lone lunatic in praising it, Publisher’s Weekly declared, “it’s clear that von Ziegesar had fun with this one, and diehard fans will undoubtedly enjoy seeing their favorite self-absorbed characters take on murderous traits as well.”
The language can drag a bit, but plot-wise, it works surprisingly smoothly — because, as Von Ziegesar told EW, a world where rich people kill whoever they want and no one really gives a shit or stops them is “kind of like an exaggerated version – a very exaggerated version – of what happens in the original [books].”
I found it to be a loopy delight; I was thrilled something so odd even existed. There’s such a joy to what should just be a silly cash grab. “As the book progresses, there is a sort of sense that the Upper East Side is getting more and more dangerous,” Von Ziegesar chortled in the EW interview. “Every single thing about this makes me laugh. I just love this so much.” That love helps it transcend whatever it was supposed to be, and becomes, as the author said her mother declared it, “a work of art!”
“Clutching the ice pick, Blair led her into the kitchen. ‘I was just thinking,’ she said, slowing down to wrap one arm around the girl’s shoulders, ‘how much I’d love to watch you’—she turned and rammed the ice pick into the girl’s chest, spattering the white tile of the kitchen island with droplets of red blood—‘die.’” —one more time, Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer, by Cecily Von Ziegesar, 2011
Looking at Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer now, its deadly prep school coeds feel like spiritual older sisters to the blasé murder girlies who suddenly filled our shelves around 2020, in books like Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts and CJ Lede’s Maeve Fly.
But unlike those books, Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer isn’t making a point about gender. Or society. Or, um, really anything?
Even given the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it’s an odd creation. After all, Jane Austen had been dead for almost 200 years before anyone started randomly inserting weird shit into her books, while von Ziegesar wrote her own mash-up, making her the only major press author to attempt such an avant garde act. So, once again: why does this thing exist?? And why do I love it??
As is clear from all the retro swirl we currently live in, we’re all full of yearning — there’s no other reason to Klarna those Lizzie McGuire tickets when you’re 38 years old. But what are we yearning for? Yes, we’re dealing with AI, the US fomenting unmitigated global and domestic chaos, millennial midlife crises, corporate overlords desperate to send us back to the black-and-white part of Pleasantville, the fact that things are horrible in a way they’ve never been before, the fact that things are horrible in a way they’ve definitely been before but we’re all too young to remember it, and incalculable other nightmares.
But what do we miss (besides a time when none of those things were happening)? We’re not just reaction machines, responding to whatever is right in front of us. We all possess deep emotional archives, that get stirred up constantly in ways we rarely understand. I think that’s maybe the most important use of nostalgia — that it contains information about the things you’re missing in your current life.
So in this retro yearning moment, what’s being stirred? I realized I was so taken by Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer, because it reminded me of a time when the internet — and the culture it created — presented the promise of play.
In a world where our hands are basically welded to tiny computers, Videodrome-style, and we can make a video on Instagram in four minutes that would have taken someone with a film degree 10 hours to make in 2006, I think it’s easy to forget how thrilling (and defiant!) internet culture once felt. That you could find a secret meaning — or just have a dumb, fun time — making mash-ups, jamming with culture, looking for clues to solve some cultural mystery of your own creation, or exploring your personal obsessions.
So much of that era — including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — is now denounced as “millennial cringe” or a “le epic bacon” sensibility. And I mean, some of it rightly so; I’ll never live down some of those ModCloth dresses I owned. But the time when going online at work felt like sneaking away from school to go dick around with your friends — there was a transgression to the playfulness of it. We were adults and we were supposed to be serious; but instead, in the face of 9/11 and the War on Terror and the Great Recession and everything else, we were playing.
I am not advocating for a return to finger-mustache tattoos, “doggos” or Ron Swanson. I barely survived I Can Haz Cheezburger the first time. However, every time I hear about how terrible the internet is now — including complaints coming out of my own mouth! — I get a funny feeling, because we make the internet. I mean, whatever, we aren’t the people who created nonlinear timelines, or censored TikTok, or decided that AI sunglasses that use the equivalent of a small town’s daily water supply so you can order at Dunkin’ Donuts without talking to anyone should exist.
But still. We’re complicit in this drab internet with no sense of play, a place that just feels like homework for a class we’re not even taking. We’ve signed off on this depressing landscape where we’ve ceded transgression to the edgelords instead of the freakazoids. We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!
And I do think we can change it, maybe. Why does the internet have to be a place where everyone’s trying to be right? Why be right when you can be weird? Why not refuse to take things — from classic literature to your own blockbuster YA writing career — too seriously? Look at the scorched, hollow, boring internet around you — what do you possibly have to lose???
Further Reading
-Vox’s Rebecca Jennings certainly explains the lifecycle of “millennial cringe” better than I ever could
-I both love this essay on the loss of middlebrow culture and wonder if my own agreement with it is just contrarianism? Like how everyone used to hate Kmart, but then they closed the Kmarts, and now everyone misses Kmart?
-In which I attempt to create a definitive classification system for all things 2000s
I think we should return to doggos — and puppers. And I vote!
Phew, we are on the same wavelength with this! Internet, what happened to you?