Grady Hendrix is so fucking brilliant. The Final Girl Support Group blew me away with its originality, its wit, and its non-stop, heart-pounding, guess-again action.
What’s a “final girl”?
“Final Girl” is the term coined for the last girl left standing in a horror story.
You know, there’s a close-knit group of a few teens, and the killer picks them off one by one until, finally, there’s only one person – usually a girl – left. And this final girl is usually the one who makes it out alive (albeit with great emotional trauma).
What’s The Final Girl Support Group about?
The Final Girl Support Group gives you a bunch of stories in one.
First and foremost, you get a stellar horror novel about serial killer. There’s a therapy group comprised of several “final girls” – each one having survived some kind of massacre of her own – and, one by one, each girl from the group is stalked by a new, present-day threat: a serial killer specifically targeting final girls. (How’s that for meta?)
While the main character driving the book is Lynnette, there are fully-developed backstories for each girl peppered throughout the main story. From what I can tell, Hendrix draws upon major horror franchises like Scream and the Freddy Kruger series for some of the characters, but there are one or two movie franchises that I’m pretty sure he completely made up just for this book.
And, as if creating all these mini-horror backstories isn’t enough, Hendrix supplements them all with “extras” – newspaper articles about each final girl’s movie; interviews with the “real” final girls; excerpts from scholarly papers psychoanalyzing the horror movie industry and its fans; top horror movie lists; etc.
I’m pretty sure these myriad extras are all made up. Like, Hendrix wrote them all. He’s a fricking’ genius. I want to lick his brain.
Why is The Final Girl Support Group different from other “final girl” books?
There are quite a few Final Girl books out there. The most recent one I can think of is Daphne by Josh Malerman (also a good read). Riley Sager published Final Girls a few years ago, and Stephen Graham Jones published The Last Final Girl before that.
I can honestly say that I had NO idea where the story in The Final Girl Support Group was going to go. From about page 5, this book was absolutely nothing like I expected, and it only got better as I kept reading. Every single page kept me on my toes, kept me guessing. This reading experience was a whirlwind ride from beginning to end.
And, all of those “extras” I mentioned earlier? They add a realistic, interactive dimension to The Final Girl Support Group that makes his characters come alive. Hendrix added similar elements to Horrorstor, and Jason Rekulak‘s Hidden Figures employed a similarly successful tactic.
An Ode to Lynnette
I want to take a few moments to focus on Lynette, the main character of The Final Girl Support Group. I loved Lynnette.
I also wanted to run away and hide from Lynnette.
She’s wildly inappropriate. Painfully hilarious. Heart-breakingly pitiable. She’s an utterly unique protagonist, and not at all who I thought I’d be following when I picked up this book.
You cringe at nearly everything Lynnette does, but, god, do you want her to succeed. You want her to be right. You want her to LIVE. Not just survive, like she’s (barely) been doing. Live.
Lynnette is the ultimate flawed protagonist, and she deserves all your love. Especially when you learn her horrific backstory.
What’s the gore factor in The Final Girl Support Group?
A trigger warning for my more delicate readers: The Final Girl Support Group gets gory. I wanted to throw up a few times while reading this one. Hendrix is very, very good at describing things juuuust enough so that while he doesn’t say what’s about to happen, but you know exactly what’s going to happen. And that image suddenly burns itself in your brain.
It’s showing at its finest. I’m taking notes, Hendrix.
Should you read The Final Girl Support Group?
If you’re a fan of Final Girl tropes, 80s slasher movies, and horror thrillers, you should read The Final Girl Support Group. I gave this novel five stars on Goodreads, but, really, it deserves 10.
If you enjoyed (and didn’t throw up while) reading Hendrix’s other novels like The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Vampire Slaying and How to Sell a Haunted House, you should be able to stomach The Final Girl Support Group. Honestly, I think this read is well-worth the nausea.
