The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

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.

~~~~~

I picked up this book in an effort to give Grady Hendrix another chance even though I hated the last book of his that I read. And it succeeded in winning me over to his dedication to horror and his knowledge of the spooktacular, however, I don’t think I’ll be reading more of his books. The Final Girl Support Group comes off as a “would-be” thriller where a band of women survivors stick together to take down the next big bad. In reality, it was the authors own love letter to the slasher film that happened to have some characters along for the ride. I did find the plot interesting and I liked some of the twists and turns that we took but I just felt very underwhelmed by this book. If you’ve already been a fan of Hendrix, you may love this book. I’ve just come to the realization that his writing isn’t for me.

We follow Lynette’s point of view. She’s a paranoid agoraphobe who talks to her singular plant and lives each moment as if she will need to run away from potential assassins any second. It’s a bleak life and starts the tone of the book very cold and uninviting. Hendrix did his job in making us uncomfortable right from the start. The support group Lynette attends has been meeting for a few decades already and they’re getting tired of one another. As the group begins to disband, destroying the one reliable thing in Lynette’s life, one of their own is murdered and a series of tragedies begin to happen too close to home to be called a coincidence when it comes to these girls. As Lynette tries to find out who is behind everything, her own worst fears of being hunted down start coming true.

Let’s start with what I liked. I loved how Henrix brought in elements from really popular, well-known slashers including actress names for the main group of characters. It made it feel very camp like a true slasher. I also liked the small glimpses into each girls backstory and what made them a final girl. To me, these moments were the scariest in the book. I also really enjoyed the parts of the book that dove into the reasons people are so obsessed with these gruesome stories. Comparing the weird fascination and fear of a bad man with a knife in comparison to the more tragic but coldly almost clinical stories of a mass shooter. Why is one the feature of many horror movies when it’s so rare, and the other something only seen on the news? Digging into the morbid in those ways and why people follow it was a really genius way of getting the reader more involved in the story itself. I also liked how, unlike The Southern Bookclub’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, this book did dig into feminism a bit as well in asking the question “why are men so obsessed with women being killed?” because it’s an honest question and it’s true in real life as well. It made the reader stop and think about how wrong our world is that those stories are what hold the most interest for humanity.

On the other hand. Hendrix NEEDS to stop writing all female casts and portraying feminine relationships as if he has ANY idea what they’re like at all. In every book of his that I’ve read, the women are catty, mean-spirited, selfish, and extremely unloyal. I can’t stand how he portrays the “friendships” between women. It’s always “oh we can’t stand each other and would throw each other under the bus but when it comes down to it we’ll die together, because that’s what friendship is”. NO, that’s NOT what friendship is and his portrayal is so oblivious that I can’t believe he hasn’t learned better and changed those dynamics in any of his books.

I also find that the characters in Hendrix novels are very one dimensional. There’s so much detailed focus on the creepy-factor that the characters just fade into the background. I read this entire book through Lynette’s point of view, inside her head, and I didn’t know her as a character at all by the end. Just that she and the rest of her group are bad friends. The most in-depth we got was Marilyn and it was only because her empathy was used as a character defect in her description (what is so wrong with a person showing empathy?). None of the other characters seemed to have any emotion besides complete despair or anger and neither of those dug deep enough into who they really were for me to feel satisfied.

Overall, 3 stars because I think the premise was good. It was campy and fun like a slasher movie but it just lacked the character development and understanding that I need in books to enjoy them. Grady Hendrix just isn’t for me.