Review: "Slayers, Every One of Us" by Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs

Slayers, Every One of Us by Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs
Published April 2025 via St. Martin's Press
★★★★

It was a classic love story: two women met and fell in love. They married and started a podcast about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (because of course). And then the classic love story went the way so many do, and they got divorced...but they kept joint custody of their podcast and learned to navigate a whole new relationship in a way that most divorced couples don't.

From the moment our separation began (and no matter how hard we tried to make it otherwise), we were in constant contact. (loc. 1191*)

It's been years since I've watched Buffy, and until I picked up this book it had never occurred to me that someone might have made a podcast (let alone a queer podcast!) about the show; I listen to podcasts only while running or playing the Sims (we all have our oddities, okay?), and I'm particular and idiosyncratic about which ones interest me. But my gosh. I'm going to have to listen to the podcast now, and I'm, well, praying to Buffy that it holds its own against this book, because this was a pretty fantastic ride.

We'd sat together for hours (and hours and hours) doing this thing we loved doing: creating work together that we found beautiful, that we found joy in, that brought us a deep sense of satisfaction. We had returned to a space that we'd only ever occupied as two people in love and had flipped the light switch back on, terrified of finding that the other person we had loved so fiercely would no longer be there. Instead we had found that the best parts of us were even more powerful after the dark had gone. (loc. 2094)

Part of the strength of the book is of course the basic hook: forging a new relationship in the wake of divorce. I've read books by people who have maintained positive relationships with exes, or built better and stronger relationships after divorce than they had before divorce, but never something with quite this intensity or quite this context. And then part of the strength is the other basic hook: Buffy. It would be really hard not to love something that pulls together Buffy and queerness and the application of Buffy to real life in both its trivial and serious moments. I'm left thinking that I need to check out the podcast and that I need to do an intensive Buffy rewatch.

It's worth noting that although this will be best for readers who have seen (and loved) substantial amounts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Russo and Youngs do an excellent job of providing enough context to carry the reader forward (without recapping so much that readers who have seen the show more recently than I have will find reading tedious). Well worth the read.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the authors and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.