The Final Girl Support Group by Grady HendrixMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read Hendrix's "Horrorstor" a while back, which was a high concept yarn of a haunted IKEA-type store. I didn't really like it in the end as the description and the early part of the book made it seem like it would be a fun Scooby-Doo type haunted house story and then it got way into blood and gore and stuff like Lovecraft or Clive Barker or something.
Final Girl Support Group is also a high concept story that seems begging for a movie or streaming series, but I think it maintains a bit more storytelling consistency. The book is of course about a group of "final girls," aka women who survived a unkillable serial killer when they were teenagers. But now years later, someone seems to be trying to kill them. Is it one of their old killers? Someone in the group? Perhaps someone else entirely?
Calling this a "horror" book seems a little misleading as it's mostly an action/thriller kind of story as Lynette--one of the "final girls"--tries to evade cops and very Earthly killers who in the end are a lot easier to take down than any slasher movie killer.
It's the kind of thing where there are twists within twists and in the end I haven't tried to unravel the twists enough to decide if they all really make sense or not. Most of the twists are just to throw red herrings at the audience so you won't guess who's responsible before it's finally revealed.
There are a lot of allusions to horror movies like Black Christmas, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream but it never really gets too on the nose or overbearing. There's a lot of meta stuff like letters and book excerpts you can read though I just used the Text to Speech in my car so I never read any of that. My loss, I suppose.
The story is narrated by Lynette, who thankfully is not the stereotypical "spunky" heroine publishers love. She's a severely traumatized woman who has to almost literally be dragged out of her shell. Yet her stubbornness to keep going in the face of losing almost everything keeps her from seeming too wimpy.
Overall it's fairly light reading and while there's violence and blood it's not an overbearing amount.
That is all.
View all my reviews
It's the kind of thing where there are twists within twists and in the end I haven't tried to unravel the twists enough to decide if they all really make sense or not. Most of the twists are just to throw red herrings at the audience so you won't guess who's responsible before it's finally revealed.
There are a lot of allusions to horror movies like Black Christmas, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream but it never really gets too on the nose or overbearing. There's a lot of meta stuff like letters and book excerpts you can read though I just used the Text to Speech in my car so I never read any of that. My loss, I suppose.
The story is narrated by Lynette, who thankfully is not the stereotypical "spunky" heroine publishers love. She's a severely traumatized woman who has to almost literally be dragged out of her shell. Yet her stubbornness to keep going in the face of losing almost everything keeps her from seeming too wimpy.
Overall it's fairly light reading and while there's violence and blood it's not an overbearing amount.
That is all.
View all my reviews
1 comment:
Interesting concept. And a little creepy.
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