[BOOKS OF THE DEAD] The Final Girl Support Group - Grady Hendrix

The Final Girl Support Group - Books of the Dead Review

Welcome to Books of the Dead. A monthly series by published author and founder of The Readers in the Rue Morgue Book Club Victoria Brown, where she deep dives into some her favourite (and not so favourite) authors and books.

Author: Grady Hendrix

Publication Date: 13/07/2021

Synopsis: 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 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 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.

Thoughts: 

I devoured this book in two days. 

‘The Final Girl Support Group’ has been described as a love letter to slasher films but I think a more accurate description is a love letter to the final girl herself. Hendrix clearly has a love for older horror, as evidenced by his previous work ‘My Best Friend’s Exorcism’, ‘How to Sell a Haunted House’, and ‘The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires’, and his passionate delve into schlocky horror in his non-fiction work ‘Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction’.

This meta tale follows Lynnette Tarkington, inspired by the Final Girl of the 1943 slasher ‘Silent Night, Deadly Night’, as she struggles to adapt to life after the brutal massacre she barely survived two decades before. She is paranoid to the point of barricading her home with booby traps, changing her route home every night, and barely being able to open her curtains for fear of someone finding her. In short, her life sucks. 

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And she’s not the only one. While some of her fellow Final Girls in her therapy group have, mostly, moved on - Marilyn (‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’) married rich, Dani (‘Halloween’) married her true love (who happens to be dying when the story begins), and Adrienne (‘Friday the 13^th’) channelled her experience into helping victims – others weren’t so lucky. Julia’s (‘Scream’) experience left her paralysed and Heather (‘Nightmare on Elm Street’) is a recovering addict. Grady is aware readers will know these stories and get the references immediately, so instead of retelling them, he intersperses the novel with police transcripts, eyewitness accounts, psychology papers etc. on the Final Girls, both as a cinematic concept and as individuals, which prompts us to consider how many different angles these women have been scrutinised under and think about how we, as consumers of this arguably sexist trope, engage with the content. 

The narrative kicks off when [SPOILER] Adrienne is killed, and Lynette becomes convinced that someone is picking the Final Girls off one by one. And she’s right, of course, but her ‘friends’ don’t believe her. From there, the novel becomes a character-driven, fast-paced story of trauma, violence, and survival. While Lynette’s unreliable and biased narration does get wearisome after a while, I think that is intentional; it directly reflects her paranoia and exhaustion. And while some of her actions may be frustrating to sit through, her choices make sense given the context of her undoubtable status as a survivor but shaky one as a traditional ‘Final Girl’.

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The concept for this novel is great. We’re so used to seeing the survivors of slashers just as they escape the horrors they’ve endured, but rarely do we see good representations of the impact it has on their lives as older women (you can debate the merits of the ‘Halloween’ and ‘Scream’ sequels all you want). It also interrogates how this trope has changed and evolved, and how our attitudes towards it have shifted. While I will admit that I wasn’t overly sold by the motives of the killers, they make sense in the context of the world so I can’t argue too much. 

‘The Final Girls Support Group’ isn’t groundbreaking or unique in the same way other works of Grady’s are, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a love letter to an old and much-loved genre. It’s one for the fans. 

Verdict: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

-Victoria Brown, Author of The Death Ship: Recovering The Bodies of Titanic's Dead

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