Title: The Final Girl Support Group
Author: Grady Hendrix
Genre: Adult, horror
Publication date: July 13th 2021
Published by: Berkley Books
Source: eARC from publishers
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Buy it: Amazon | Book DepositorySynopsis: 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.
As a huge horror movie fan, the title of this book immediately caught my attention. The concept of a final girl support group and getting to follow these final girls after the horrific ordeals they went through and just seeing how they deal with it all was very intriguing to me. I loved the concept of this book! And overall, I really enjoyed it!
One of my favorite things about the book were all the horror movie references. We have a group of final girls and their stories are based on some of the biggest horror franchises, so that was a lot of fun for me. We’ve got one girl whose story follows Friday the 13th, another’s is A Nightmare on Elm Street, and we also got Scream, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I believe our main character’s story (Lynette’s) was inspired by Silent Night, Deadly Night. But don’t quote me on that. I know of the series, but that last one is literally the only series I have not seen out of all of these. I will have to change that this upcoming holiday season, though!
Learning about what each girl went through was very intriguing, but also so sad and just frustrating. The Scream storyline was particularly infuriating because the final girl's boyfriend wanted to turn her into his very own final girl. It was disgusting. Lynette’s story was also quite horrifying. The things she endured and how she watched her family get horrifically murdered... It was awful! I was very engaged during these retellings, though. Like I said, this aspect of the book was one of my favorite things and I just really enjoyed seeing how the author took the concept of these horror movies and made them his own. It was great!
This world was just very interesting because we have all these terrible things that have happened to these girls, but of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, movies were made out of these tragedies. So not only do we have REAL final girls, but we also have the movies that were based on real-life events. There was one movie that was brought up quite a bit, Gnomecoming, and I still don’t know what real movie this fake movie is based on! 😂
Not only that, but we also have memorabilia from the real life events (aka murderabilia) that are quite coveted by a certain type of person 😬 One thing I found interesting was that not only was there murderabilia for things related to our final girls, but also to tragedies related to OUR real world! For example, H.H. Holmes was mentioned. The mix of fiction and nonfiction was very cool!
The mystery itself was interesting, but a little bit predictable. But like I said, I really enjoyed this book overall! The backstories were interesting, the gore was disgusting and awesome, and even the chapter titles themselves were a lot of fun! I definitely recommend this book, especially if you’re a horror movie fan like myself!
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