Book Review: The Final Girl Support Group, by Grady Hendrix
It's another Final Girls book. Can you ever have too many Final Girls? Can you have too many slasher flicks?
Berkley Books, 2021, 352 pages
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 best-selling novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, 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.
Grady Hendrix is a guy with a deep appreciation for the horror genre: all of it, from Lovecraftian monsters to campy slasher flicks to psychological thrillers. His Paperbacks from Hell is a coffee table book that should be on every horror fan's coffee table, but I have yet to read a dud from him. He writes humorous horror that is still horror. Terrible things happen, people die, and the survivors don't act like they are in a cheesy movie.
The Final Girl Support Group is perhaps the weakest of his works, which doesn't mean it's bad. It just wasn't a bloody banger like We Sold Our Souls or My Best Friend's Exorcism, and it wasn't quite as funny and self-aware as Horrorstör.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the "Final Girl" trope has now been thoroughly plumbed, perhaps starting with the Scream franchise, but more recently with Riley Sager's Final Girls and Stephen Graham Jones The Last Final Girl. When Final Girls are practically a subgenre in themselves, you either need to have a really novel twist, or an excellent execution.
Grady Hendrix's execution is fine, and I enjoyed this book for what it was. But the bottom line is that the story is almost beat for beat the same as Riley Sager's book. You have a group of girls who were each the sole survivors of a massacre, and now they are unwilling celebrities, bonded in a macabre sisterhood. They are fucked up in various ways by their experiences, and then someone seems to be coming after them, and the main character has to figure out who the real enemy is while trying to convince the other Final Girls that the threat is real and she's not crazy.
Being inside Lynnette Tarkington's head, we see just how badly her life was derailed by seeing her entire family murdered in front of her. She suffers from a kind of imposter's syndrome, because she's not a "real" Final Girl: the other Final Girls actually fought or escaped. She just got impaled on a pair of antlers and hung on the wall for ten hours until she was rescued. And yes, it was as awful as it sounds; like I said, Hendrix doesn't shy away from the psychological impact of surviving something like that, even in this campy, self-aware horror novel. Lynnete is a mess, so unsurprisingly once the body count starts to rise again, it's not hard for everyone else to be convinced she's batshit crazy, leading to the other genre staple, the one person who knows what's going on being the person no one will listen to. Of course there are twists and red herrings up until the end, because it wouldn't be any fun if the villain was revealed before the climax and if there wasn't a twist even after the reveal.
Of all the Final Girls books I've read, I'd have to give the nod to Hendrix's take. They're all good reads, but they basically tell the same story.
Also by Grady Hendrix: My reviews of Paperbacks from Hell, We Sold Our Souls, Horrorstör, and My Best Friend's Exorcism.
My complete list of book reviews.
Berkley Books, 2021, 352 pages
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 best-selling novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, 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.
Grady Hendrix is a guy with a deep appreciation for the horror genre: all of it, from Lovecraftian monsters to campy slasher flicks to psychological thrillers. His Paperbacks from Hell is a coffee table book that should be on every horror fan's coffee table, but I have yet to read a dud from him. He writes humorous horror that is still horror. Terrible things happen, people die, and the survivors don't act like they are in a cheesy movie.
The Final Girl Support Group is perhaps the weakest of his works, which doesn't mean it's bad. It just wasn't a bloody banger like We Sold Our Souls or My Best Friend's Exorcism, and it wasn't quite as funny and self-aware as Horrorstör.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the "Final Girl" trope has now been thoroughly plumbed, perhaps starting with the Scream franchise, but more recently with Riley Sager's Final Girls and Stephen Graham Jones The Last Final Girl. When Final Girls are practically a subgenre in themselves, you either need to have a really novel twist, or an excellent execution.
Grady Hendrix's execution is fine, and I enjoyed this book for what it was. But the bottom line is that the story is almost beat for beat the same as Riley Sager's book. You have a group of girls who were each the sole survivors of a massacre, and now they are unwilling celebrities, bonded in a macabre sisterhood. They are fucked up in various ways by their experiences, and then someone seems to be coming after them, and the main character has to figure out who the real enemy is while trying to convince the other Final Girls that the threat is real and she's not crazy.
Being inside Lynnette Tarkington's head, we see just how badly her life was derailed by seeing her entire family murdered in front of her. She suffers from a kind of imposter's syndrome, because she's not a "real" Final Girl: the other Final Girls actually fought or escaped. She just got impaled on a pair of antlers and hung on the wall for ten hours until she was rescued. And yes, it was as awful as it sounds; like I said, Hendrix doesn't shy away from the psychological impact of surviving something like that, even in this campy, self-aware horror novel. Lynnete is a mess, so unsurprisingly once the body count starts to rise again, it's not hard for everyone else to be convinced she's batshit crazy, leading to the other genre staple, the one person who knows what's going on being the person no one will listen to. Of course there are twists and red herrings up until the end, because it wouldn't be any fun if the villain was revealed before the climax and if there wasn't a twist even after the reveal.
Of all the Final Girls books I've read, I'd have to give the nod to Hendrix's take. They're all good reads, but they basically tell the same story.
Also by Grady Hendrix: My reviews of Paperbacks from Hell, We Sold Our Souls, Horrorstör, and My Best Friend's Exorcism.
My complete list of book reviews.