How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates by by Shailee Thompson

Title: How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates

Author: Shailee Thompson

Genre: Thriller

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 28^th January 2026

Format: Paperback

Pages: 368

Price: $34.99

Synopsis: A hilarious, swoony and downright terrifying horror romance in which a cinephile gets caught in the middle of a murder spree at a speed-dating event and must use her encyclopaedic knowledge of the rom-com and horror genres to make it as a real-life Final Girl.

When cinephile Jamie Prescott attends a speed-dating event, she expects to meet some mediocre men and have a laugh – she doesn’t expect one of her dates to have his throat slit at her table during a blackout. When the lights come back on, there are more bodies on the floor and the doors are locked.

Armed with makeshift weapons and her extensive knowledge of what not to do in a slasher, Jamie must figure out how to make it out of the building alive. But as the night progresses, she begins to suspect the killer is committing the slayings to woo one of the daters. Whatever happened to roses and perfume?

And why can’t Jamie stay focused on the important thing here, which is obviously not getting murdered, instead of being distracted by a few hot guys? And what if one of those hot guys happens to be the bad guy?

Oops.

Laugh-out-loud funny and hide-under-your-bed scary, How to Kill a Guy in Ten Dates puts the killer in killer love story.

~*~

A love story, but make it a murder mystery. That’s what this debut novel from Shailee Thompson is all about. It’s title is a cheeky nod to the movie, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live out your own rom-com turned horror or slasher movie? What would you do? How would you survive? How would you apply the rules for survival in horror or slasher films? This is the situation that Jamie Prescott, PhD candidate finds herself in at a speed dating night. Things are going well…until the lights go out, and her date is dead. In the chaos of people trying to escape, the lights go out again, and the door is locked. And there are more bodies. As the resident expert in slasher films and rom coms, the surviving group looks to Jamie for what to do and how to survive. She just has to convince them to stop breaking the number one rule: Never split up.

Shailee Thompson’s debut is a cheeky look at the tropes of popular movie genres like thriller and rom coms, and the similarities they have within their formulas whilst striving for a different goal. Jamie knows things aren’t going to go well, that there is a Big Bad out there, and one of the women is going to be the Final Girl…or Leading Lady, depending on how they all see this night. It’s also playing on the locked room mystery trope, so the action all takes place in one night club as the killer stalks people, picking them off one-by-one to try and garner the romantic attention of the one they have in their sights. It’s clear that someone in the club is the killer, someone is the object of their obsession, and everyone else is, well, just in the way.

How to Kill A Guy in Ten Dates is a horror, romance and thriller all rolled into one, using the classic tropes from each genre. Don’t split up. Don’t say I’ll be right back. You know, all the things we yell at the TV for when characters do those things in movies and TV shows and then the bad things happen. They get hurt. They nearly die. They die. Anyone who has watched or read crime, horror and thriller will know this feeling. The novel explores how the rules of these genres and survival play out in ‘real life’. That is, Jamie’s real life, and each chapter begins with a famous quote from a romantic comedy altered perfectly for the tone of the book. It is also peppered with lots of movie references that many people who have watched them should get.

And it reflects the messy world of dating and living as a woman, probably in her thirties in a world so entrenched by apps and being online. A speed dating night feels fresh to these characters, and gives them a chance to connect in person. A chance to get to know someone.  But can you really know someone after ten minutes of talking to them? It also feels like a commentary on how we see people, how we judge them and how we assess them, especially when pushed into high stakes and traumatic situations like Jamie, Laurie and the rest of the daters have been. It grapples with how we see people as well, and the tropes of film characters: the cop, the quiet one, the loud one…and in playing with those, it reveals just how entrenched the archetypes and tropes are. Because we see them all the time in film and books, it feels like they’re part of our everyday as well.

This is a clever, observant and tongue-in-cheek novel that reminds us that the movies aren’t real life. That the stories aren’t always neatly completed. It’s messy, things are complicated and not everything is always neatly resolved. Fiction resolves things, especially crime fiction to give the reader a sense of finality and justice, a sense that everything is concluded neatly. Yet it’s the after that matters. What happens to those affected, their trauma and how do you solve a case when there are so many questions and ways it could be unresolved? I think that’s what this book is trying to answer. The after the credits roll. After the Final Girl survives or after the Leading Lady is shown with her happily ever after. The messiness of life still exists in amongst the neatly resolved plot.