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The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
Publication date: July 13th, 2021
Pages: 351
Spice: N/A
Synopsis:
In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives... but what happens after?
Like his bestselling novel The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampries, Grady Hendrix's latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films--movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.
Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade she's been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized--someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.
But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.
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Review:
Lynnette is one the most pitied final girl in her support group. She is seen as a loose cannon who can't seem to move on from her past. She is constantly looking over her shoulder and worried that if the support group crumbles that they would all be made to be sitting ducks for their attackers to pick off one by one. They are strongest together. But when the first final group of their group is murdered it throws Lynnette into a frenzy. All her preparations have led to this. But it seems someone else is aware of all her precautions and is one step ahead of her at every turn. With her group thinking she had lost her mind and the evidence against her starting to grow will anyone believe her when she says that someone is out to kill all the famous final girls, one by one?
I will preface this by saying that I don't watch a lot of slasher films but I know the ones referenced in this book because of their infamy. There were points where I had to go look up what happened in the film to understand a bit of the low level references, but that is only due to my curiosity and not a requirement to enjoy the book. In this book the author gives nods to Sydney from Scream, Sally from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alice from Friday the 13th, Laurie from Halloween, and Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Our main character is thought to be a side character in a lesser known horror flick. I think if I would have seen any of these movies aside from Halloween and Scream I would have maybe enjoyed it a bit more as I picked through the plethora of easter eggs hidden within the story.
Lynnette was an absolute mess. She was the stupidest final girl I have ever seen. She just bumbles around throwing out theories as to who the big baddies are without any idea what is happening. She only falls into figuring it out in the last final chapters after accusing over a dozen people before hand. She came across as a nut job the entire time and there wasn't a single reference to a shower so she was almost a smelly nut job with how long she was running from person to person trying to solve her mystery and clear her name. But I think if she was as strong and sure as the other final girls then it would have been a much shorter story and the big evil would have been sussed out by me a lot easier. As it were I had no idea who the killer was until close to the end.
This book was absolutely difficult to put down and I knew I was going to enjoy it from chapter one. I started recommending it before I even finished it. I have at least two other friends who are going to read it and maybe they can shed some light on things I may have missed in the horror movie ignorance. I think it was a decisively unique premise and was horrific without being grotesque. Hendrix did a great job of keeping things balanced and putting together a really riveting read.
