The Final Girl Support Group

by Grady Hendrix

Hardcover, 339 pages

English language

Published July 13, 2021 by Berkley Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-43704-9

(5 reviews)

A fast-paced, thrilling horror novel that follows a group of heroines to die for, from the brilliant New York Times bestselling author of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.

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 …

A fast-paced, thrilling horror novel that follows a group of heroines to die for, from the brilliant New York Times bestselling author of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires.

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.

6 editions

Cade reviewed The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Takes slasher film tropes in a new direction, doesn't escape bias against mental illness

4 stars

Content warning mild spoilers for plot, cw for book's handling of mental health

I did enjoy reading this book, and the twists and turns were exciting to follow. The way the narrative plays with and pokes fun at slasher movie tropes is entertaining.

OTOH, it's a little exhausting to be inside the main character's head since she is very paranoid (rightfully so) and her paranoia is always misdirected (otherwise there would be no twists in the plot).

Another downside, the word crazy is thrown around a lot. I think the author tries to treat the issue of PTSD with some sensitivity, but the story establishes a dichotomy between the "good" people with trauma who are handling it "right" and the "bad" "crazy" traumatized people whose issues with drugs, violence, and mental illness are treated as character flaws more than understandable responses to horrific events.

In this book, the many killers, who are mostly men with a couple of exceptions, are evil just because. Characters refer to the killers as monsters repeatedly and very little in the narrative challenges this perception. I have read/seen very few stories that showed a killer as both monstrous and fully human (Hannibal Lecter is a good example, for all the flaws of those novels and adaptations), and this book did not succeed in that. Maybe it doesn't have to? The killer as a force of nature can work, if the focus of the story is on the protagonist's personal journey or if it's some meta commentary or whatever. But the final killer isn't that either, and that's the point (it's spelled out in the text). However, neither were they given enough characterization to be seen as people, so it just fell flat for me. I did like the very last scene though.

if you can overlook some of the more problematic aspects, it's a good read.