Well, damn.

Mix together Daisy Jones & the Six, Natural Born Killers and Yellowjackets and you’ll get the sharp, arch Only One Survives, the story of the drummer of a pop/rock band who’s the sole survivor of a disaster that claims the lives of her friends… or so it seems.

Vienna Taylor wants it all, and she thinks her band – the Bittersweet – is the key to getting there. They started out as a duo in high school – EmVee, a ‘portmanteau’ of Vienna and her best friend, Madison – with a viral performance under their belts. Madison and Vienna could not be more different; Madison is a rich and spoiled party girl, with highfalutin parents. Vienna is poor and illegitimate, the victim of her mother’s horrendous choices, and is slowly losing her beloved grandmother to dementia. Through Vienna’s determination, they become a band.

The band has a rising single and are heading toward the possibility of making real connections in the biz when everything suddenly goes horrifyingly wrong. Their van crashes on a snowy mountain road, resulting in the instant death of one band member, Isabel, and the horrible injury of another. Vienna and Madison enter into a tug-of-war for control of the lives of the rest of the passengers – videographer Libby, and their other bandmates, Evelina and Gabi. The fivesome head to a nearby cabin to shelter from the elements, and one by one the rest of the Bittersweet die – except for Vienna. Libby also survives, but seems to have no memory of the accident. Madison, meanwhile, is missing. Only Vienna holds the key to the deaths which surround her.

Returning to civilization, fame and infamy tangle within Vienna as paranoia overcomes her. The world draws a line in the sand, some of them taking her side but many others falling on Madison’s, who blames Vienna for everything. Disasters pile up, more bodies tumble out of the closet, temptation looms, and soon Vienna is left wondering if she’s being stalked by an outside force – and how far she’ll go both to protect her newfound fame and her freedom.

Only One Survives is slightly marred by a predictable ending, which goes full-on Psycho explain-the-crimes and spoonfeeds the audience most of the missing details. I’d already guessed the nature of Vienna’s problems due to Ebert’s law of character economy pages ago and so may the astute reader.

I have to give McKinnon credit for ping-ponging between so many genres here. We start with survival horror with a touch of high school drama, then veer into To Die For territory. The book reaches more of a Gone Girl tone by its conclusion. Almost all of these tones are pretty effective and work to tell the story.

Don’t come into Only One Survives expecting cut-and-dried black-and white-morality; McKinnon isn’t afraid to make all of her characters sympathetic, but also self-deluded, fame-hungry and terrible. There’s some drug content, some sexual content, and some on-page blood and guts. None of it’s romantic, and that’s just fine; it makes up for that with a chilling sense of self-driven ambition. Just like Vienna, it knows how to get what it wants.