Review of "The Final Girl Support Group" by Grady Hendrix

Title: The Final Girl Support Group

Author: Grady Hendrix 

Release Date: July 13, 2021 

Rating: 3/5  

Publisher: Berkley Books 

TW: death, violence, murder, gore

Book Summary:

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 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. 

Review:  

Have you ever wondered what happens to the Final Girl of a movie once the screen goes black and the credits roll? They go to a place where everyone understand what they've been through: The Final Girl Support Group.

This was my first time reading a Grady Hendrix book, and I would like to try to give him another shot after this one. 

I enjoyed the nod to horror movies like Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I read in a different review that the names of the characters were based on the actresses that played the Final Girls in these films, which was a great homage to the genre and to the actresses in those iconic roles.

Hendrix's language was interesting for a book that is marketed as horror but wasn't quite horror. I found it interesting how Lynette would describe some of her surroundings in relation to gore (e.g. garlands described like intestines), since it seems like death and gore were the only things that she thought about as a Final Girl.

The story is written in a first person perspective following Lynnette Tarkington, one of five surviving Final Girls, five of whom meet once a month at the Final Girl Support Group with their therapist Dr. Carol Elliot.

There was a campy nature to it that most slasher films carry: Lynette having a plant that she would mentally communicate with was pretty silly. 

As I've been typing this review, I reduced my rating realizing that while it was a page-turner--I finished the last half of the book in a couple of hours--I realized that it really didn't stick with me the way I thought it would. The characters felt flat, and lacked likability. I wish we saw more of the support group to understand these characters more, and maybe to understand Adrienne more since she was brought up quite a bit later in the story.

There was very little character development, and the little character development there was appeared within the last final chapters. 

Overall, it was an easy read and a nice callback to some iconic slasher films (and their insane sequels and prequels).

THERE MAY BE SPOILERS PASSED THIS POINT