I finished The Burning Girls three weeks ago and I’m still thinking about it. Not in that “oh, nice book” way, but in the way a good nightmare sticks with you. It’s the kind that makes you reconsider things you thought you understood about silence, community, and what we choose not to see.
C.J. Tudor has done something clever here. She’s written what looks like a folk horror thriller but functions as an uncomfortable mirror. Sure, there are ghost girls with charred skin and centuries-old secrets, but the real horror? That’s us. It’s what we do when we decide some truths are too expensive to face.
The Setup (Or: How to Make a Fresh Start Feel Like a Funeral)
Reverend Jack Brooks arrives in Chapel Croft with her teenage daughter Flo, both running from something they’d rather not name. Jack’s unconventional for a vicar. She drinks, she swears, she doesn’t do sanctimony. Think if Fleabag had gone to divinity school instead of therapy. Chapel Croft, meanwhile, is one of those English villages where everyone knows everyone, no one trusts outsiders, and the local history involves burning people alive. Charming.
What Jack and Flo find isn’t refuge. It’s a place where Protestant martyrs were torched five centuries ago, where two teenage girls vanished thirty years back, and where the previous vicar disappeared under circumstances no one wants to discuss. The village has rituals. The villagers have secrets. And Flo keeps seeing things that shouldn’t be there. Ghostly girls with blackened skin and accusatory stares.
Tudor doesn’t do slow burns. She does controlled explosions.
What Makes This Work (When So Much Gothic Horror Doesn’t)
First, Jack Brooks. She’s not your typical clergy protagonist. No gentle wisdom or moral certainty here. She’s flawed, defensive, and deeply human. Her relationship with Flo isn’t some Hallmark version of motherhood; it’s complicated, protective, sometimes fraught. Tudor understands that the most compelling characters are the ones who make you think, “I might do the same thing,” even when that thing is probably unwise.
Second, the folk horror elements never feel decorative. The burning of the Protestant martyrs in 1556 isn’t historical window dressing. It’s a wound that never healed, a trauma the village has ritualized but never processed. Tudor uses history the way Shirley Jackson used architecture: as a character in itself, oppressive and inescapable.
Third, and this matters, the book refuses easy answers. Is it supernatural? Is it psychological? Is the real horror what people do to each other when they think God (or tradition, or reputation) is on their side? Tudor keeps you guessing, and more importantly, keeps you thinking.
7 Things The Burning Girls Teaches Us (Whether We Want to Learn Them or Not)
1. The Past Doesn’t Stay Buried. It Ferments
Every unresolved trauma, every covered-up crime, every “we don’t talk about that” becomes toxic over time. Chapel Croft’s refusal to deal with its history —the martyrs, the missing girls, the secrets—has poisoned everything. In your own life: what are you not talking about? What’s festering?
2. Your Gut Knows Things Your Brain Hasn’t Figured Out Yet
Jack and Flo both sense something’s wrong before they can articulate why. Tudor rewards characters who trust their instincts. Most of us have been trained to rationalize away our discomfort. Don’t. That uncomfortable feeling when you walk into a room? Listen to it.
3. “We’ve Always Done It This Way” Is the Most Dangerous Sentence in English
The villagers’ rituals like the Burning Girls ceremony, the way they close ranks, are traditions that serve power, not truth. Question the customs you follow without thinking. Ask who benefits from “the way things are.”
4. Community Can Be Prison or Sanctuary (Usually It’s Both)
Chapel Croft shows how tight-knit communities can protect their own or protect themselves from their own. The same bonds that offer belonging can enforce silence. Consider: what secrets is your community keeping, and at whose expense?
5. Being the Outsider Gives You Clarity the Insiders Have Lost
Jack sees what the villagers can’t or won’t. There’s power in not being invested in the status quo. If you’ve ever been the new person, the different one, the one who doesn’t quite fit, that’s not just discomfort. It’s perspective. Use it.
6. Parenthood Is About Preparing Your Kid for the World’s Darkness, Not Denying It
Jack doesn’t shield Flo from reality; she arms her with truth and trust. The strongest moment in the book isn’t Jack protecting Flo, it’s Jack believing her. Teach the children in your life that their perceptions matter, that their fears are valid, that they can handle hard truths.
7. Light Doesn’t Always Win, But It Always Reveals
The burning of the martyrs was meant to be purifying light. Instead, it revealed who the real monsters were. Whether it’s shining light on historical injustice or speaking truth in your own life, you can always expect resistance. Do it anyway.
Who Needs This Book in Their Life
Read this if you loved The Witcher 3’s Bloody Baron quest, Midsommar, or any story where the real horror is what humans do to each other. Read it if you’re drawn to strong, complicated women who don’t apologize for taking up space. Read it if you find yourself thinking about generational trauma, about how violence echoes through time, about what happens when no one says “enough.”
Read it if you want something that lingers and not just jump scares but the kind of unease that makes you look differently at your own town’s founding myths.
Who Should Probably Skip It
If you’re looking for a cosy mystery where justice is tidy and evil is obvious, this isn’t it. If graphic historical violence or themes of child endangerment are triggers for you, proceed carefully or not at all. If you prefer your genre fiction to stay neatly in its lane and if the idea of folk horror meeting psychological thriller meeting family drama feels like too much then this might not be your book.
And if you need your clergy characters to be saintly and your endings to be unambiguous, Tudor will disappoint you on purpose.
The Verdict (Or: Why This Matters Beyond Scaring You)
The Burning Girls does what the best thrillers do: it uses horror as a delivery system for uncomfortable truths. It asks whether faith and doubt can coexist (yes). It asks whether communities can ever really change (maybe). It asks what we owe the dead and what we owe the living (everything, and it’s never enough).
Tudor has crafted something that works both as entertainment as it’s genuinely tense, cleverly plotted, hard to put down and as provocation. Long after you’ve figured out what happened to the missing girls and who the apparitions really are, you’ll be thinking about the ways we ritualize rather than resolve, the ways we choose comfort over confrontation, the ways we let history happen to us instead of learning from it.
This is a book that wants you to remember, to change, and to act. It wants you to look at your own community’s sacred cows and ask: what are we protecting, and why? It wants you to be the person who asks the uncomfortable questions, who trusts their gut, who doesn’t settle for “that’s just how it is.”
Chapel Croft is a warning dressed up as a story. Heed it.
jujucation.com 