Books: The Final Girls Support Group By Grady Hendrix (2021)

“In horror movies, the final girl is the one who's left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her? Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she's not alone. For more than a decade she's been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette's worst fears are realized--someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece. But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.”

While The Final Girl Support Group pays homage to the last four decades of slasher films, the books themes writer Grady Hendrix trots out gets lost in the seemly torpid James Patterson inspired dialogue and Hendrix’s attempt to appeal to a certain sub-group of teens who came of age in the late 1980s and early 90s. It wants to be a clever dissection of the genre, but can’t get over what is an essentially B-film horror schlock.

I caught early on that this book was also a sort of attempt to explore male misogyny and a lot of women’s obsession with true crime books and local murders. We get the men who hate women and women who become enamored of popular male killers –and how they can be easily manipulated, these impressionable teens. Then he tries to use those tropes and themes to give women the ability to fight back.

My biggest issue was keeping all the characters straight –I mean all the women in most of these horror films are essentially the same character. There is really nothing to separate them, to make them stand apart from each other. And it didn’t help I felt no emotional connection to even the main protagonist, Lynn. I can’t understand anyone, let a women, who suffer such trauma, but Lynn never made anyone, even herself, remotely likable.

Another mixed bag for me, an interesting (maybe brilliant) dea but executed in an only half interesting way. Which is funny, considering I’ve had the basic same issues with his two previous novels, My Best Friend’s Exorcism and The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.

I don’t know, maybe this may have worked as a novella more than a novel.