Grady Hendrix's new novel, The Final Girl Support Group, amuses and frustrates in almost equal measure, which isn't helped by Lynette, our focus character, being agoraphobic and paranoid, nor do a few dropped plot lines through the course of the book. (To be fair, Lynette first got hung on a rack of antlers in Utah by a guy dressed like Santa who then killed her boyfriend Tommy; a few years later, the killer's brother also dressed up as Santa and tried to shoot her.)
On the other hand, given the basis of the novel, this isn't exactly a great surprise, since the mostly 70's-80's Slashers popping up in here had similar issues. (I mean, one girl, Julia, went through this universe's Scream, which was the early 90's, and Stephanie, who we meet later on, just more or less undergoes the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th. The original is represented by Adrienne, much like Nightmare on Elm Street is represented in Heather, while Marilyn went through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dani's brother escaped the asylum on Halloween to try to kill her both at home and later at the hospital. Crazy Chrissy, who we meet towards the end, is not part of this group, mainly because she fell in love with the guy stalking her Homecoming dance, and now sells murderabelia. For those who haven't caught on to the naming conventions here, our Final Girls either share the name of the actress who survived the initial franchise offering, or have a name that's a play on it.)
The main girls here (Lynette, Julia, Adrienne, Marilyn, Dani, Heather) are all part of a long term group therapy session with Dr. Elliott. As happens with long term therapy, most everyone is in a rut, following the same patterns that they've been cast in. Adrienne now owns Camp Red Hook, which she's turned into a sanctuary for women survivors of violence. Not long after the start, a new massacre happens at Red Hook, leading Adrienne to kill herself. Someone else confesses to the murders Dani stopped, making her doubt that she did the right thing by killing her brother with a tire iron. The man who killed Lynette's family and boyfriend reveals the letters she wrote to him as part of a pen pal program and says that they'd had a sexual relationship, which sets her up as an accomplice.
Not long after Lynette's apartment gets shot up, she starts believing that someone much have hacked her hard drive, read the book she was writing filled with her perceptions of her group mates, and is using that information to take down the final girls. (Some of this gets proven correct after all the girls get emailed copies of the book.)
Lynette goes on the run, gets arrested, gets broken out by the lawyer she used to sleep with, then goes on the run with Stephanie in tow, thinking the newest final girl is likely also a target.
Eventually, we do find out everything that's going on and why, but there's quite a bit of missing information towards the end, most of which involves secondary plots.
I've seen a few posts on goodreads questioning this book vs. Riley Sager's debut novel Final Girls, and while they share similar themes, they are not the same book. While they share similar set ups, Sager's is a lot less movie obsessed, and the heroine there is less sure of her own motives. Hendrix, who's writing tends to center on various tropes and molding them into something new, takes this narrative in different directions, and doesn't make the rookie mistake of throwing the two biggest plot twists within a page of each other and 5 pages before the end. They're both fun reads. And other than a similarity of titles, they're very different reads.
While a few loose threads brought this down a peg, I still really enjoyed this one.
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