By Grady Hendrix
Publisher: Berkley
July 13, 2021
ASIN: B08MBQKTTQ ISBN: 9780593201237
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 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.
Lynette 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.
Reviewed by Pamela K. Kinney
I gave The Final Girl Support Group 4 ax-wielding sheep.
One of the real-life final girls, Lynette, meets five other final girls and a therapist, Dr. Carol, in a secret support group for a decade now. The main narrator, Lynette, is paranoid and vigilant, often to the extreme. She quit living except for the group and is unpleasant, but after a while, I started liking her. She is well-prepared in the event of a sneak attack from the murderers trying to take her out, but she finds herself unprepared when someone attacks who is always one step ahead of her.
It is campy, gory sometimes, and over-the-top, just like many of those slasher horror films. It’s as if Halloween’s Michael Myers got together with Scream’s GhostFace and had a child, this book just might be it. A wild ride.
Reviewer: Midu Reads
3.5 sheep
What I Liked
The author's description of Lynette's routine when she had to leave her house is something I enjoyed reading the heck out of. It felt so real and so warranted because of what she had been through that I cheered her on!There was no glossing over the violence in this book. Sure, the horror doesn't translate as viscerally on-page as it does on screen. Even so, it made for a thrilling read. Lynette's run-in with her monster reminded me a lot of one of the cases that Hannibal and Graham come across in the series--brilliant, bloody, and beautiful.
What I Didn't Like
The same things that bother me when I'm watching a slasher flick bothered me while reading this book too. For instance, Lynette surviving a sledgehammer to the head and being run over by a car. I mean, really? A long-winded final confrontation--another thing that is characteristic of the movies and one that I'm not a fan of.
The protagonist tells us the main reason she hates final girl movies is that the characters in them are reduced to lumps of meats--both literally and figuratively. And yet, isn't that what she and her friends do to Dani's gf when they leave her body in a park?
Conclusion
A very entertaining book that's written to keep readers from putting it down before they're done with it. I speak from experience since I went to work all smudgy-eyed after having stayed up until 4 in the am!
New York Times bestselling author Grady Hendrix makes up lies and sells them to people. His novels include HORRORSTÖR about a haunted IKEA, MY BEST FRIEND'S EXORCISM, which is basically "Beaches" meets "The Exorcist", WE SOLD OUR SOULS, a heavy metal horror epic, THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB'S GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES, and THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP, coming on July 13, 2021. He's also the author of PAPERBACKS FROM HELL, an award-winning history of the horror paperback boom of the Seventies and Eighties. He wrote the screenplay for, MOHAWK, a horror flick about the War of 1812, and SATANIC PANIC about a pizza delivery woman fighting rich Satanists. You can discover more ridiculous facts about him at www.gradyhendrix.com.
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