Gretchen Lang

Gretchen Lang is one of the two central friends in Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism — the girl whose demonic possession in the summer of 1988 transforms her from Abby's best friend into something terrifying, testing the limits of what friendship can survive and what loyalty actually demands. The novel is structured as a love story between friends, and Gretchen's possession is the crisis that forces Abby to prove what their relationship is actually worth.

Hendrix writes Gretchen with genuine pathos — she is a victim as much as a threat, and the horror of watching her change is inseparable from grief for the person she was. The 1980s setting gives her story a specific cultural texture of slumber parties, aerobics videos, and Christian rock that makes the supernatural intrusion all the more disorienting. Her friendship with Abby, and what Abby is willing to do to get her back, is the emotional core of one of horror fiction's most genuinely moving novels.