| Title | : | The Final Girl Support Group |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 059320123X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780593201237 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 342 |
| Publication | : | First published July 13, 2021 |
| Awards | : | Bram Stoker Award Best Novel (2021), Goodreads Choice Award Horror (2021) |
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.
The Final Girl Support Group Reviews
-
I’m giving ten gazillion stars and getting out of here!
There are some incredible books written by extraordinary minds make you feel everything at the same time and once you finish them you feel speechless because no words will be enough to reflect your emotions! This book is great example of these extremely fantastic reads and Mr. Hendrix proved one more time to us he is a true literature prodigy!
I’m die hard fan of Southern Book Club’s guide to the slaying vampires. It was my favorite thriller book of the last year. He knows how to construct the complex bonding of genuine female friendship and develop rich memorable, survivor, kickass women characters we adore!
At this book: his amazing heroines are true survivors of the massacres, kicking the asses of monsters, real last women standing who try to learn how to move on their lives after being endured brutal violence and fought against the real psychopaths!
There are six of them left behind: ( actually they were lucky number seven but one of them idolized the villains who turned their lives into mess, becoming traitor, leaving their devoted group! Yes, I’m talking about Crazy Chrissy who is one of the most terrifying villanelles I’ve been introduced lately!!)
Lynnette Tarkington keeps punishing herself, turning her house into her own cage, living like a ghost with no proper ID, social life, keeping her address as a secret, always looking behind her back.
Now the leader of their group who brought them together for joining final girl support group is dead! Lynette’s address is compromised as Julia visits her accompanied by reporter who wrote their story. As soon as they gathered at her place, somebody start shooting. Lynette runs away leaving wounded Julia and dead reporter behind!
There is a book outside spills out their dirty secrets and there might be someone targeting last women standing. One of them’s house is bombed as the other one gets into custody after uneventful confession of a criminal which triggers more trauma!
Are all of these vengeful events coincidences? Is Lynnette really getting more insane? Are all of those conspiracies created by her unhealthy imagination?
I think I loved each of the women differently. Feckless, flimsy, entertaining Heather, posh, well mannered, recovering alcoholic Marilyn, activist, know it all, furious Julia and of course Lynnette: fighting against her guilt feelings and self flagellation, misfit of the group because she didn’t kill her monsters : she just left them torture her!
The realistic violence and true reflections of distorted minds in the book were so blood freezing and impeccably executed! I also enjoyed the movie articles about teen slashers produced based on those women’s real traumas! I loved the author’s tribute to the popular culture references, slasher movies!
There are tons of things made me fall hard for this book and I’m telling you: this will probably stay as my best horror/ thriller reads of the year.
It was soul shaking, dark, gory, spine tingling, mind spinning adventure!
Twists are well played, the riveting action chapters, surprising revelations, survival instincts of the characters with increasing tension were impressively well executed!
I LOVED IT SO MUCH!
I need more works of the author ASAP! His skillful writing style is addictive! I read it in a half day and now I’ll search for 364 more days to find something as great as this marvelous journey!
Millions of thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing For sharing this freaking amazing digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest opinions. -
It’s not often I find myself thinking a book would probably be better as a movie, but here we are.
Grady Hendrix’s latest novel, The Final Girl Support Group, takes a cheeky look at the last girls alive at the end of slasher flicks. The central premise being, what if Sally from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Nancy from “Nightmare on Elm Street” and a handful of other final girls got together regularly for group therapy?
Brilliant idea! Okay-ish execution.
While Hendrix’s characters are inspired by cinematic scream queens, they’re his own creations. Here Sally is Marilyn from Panhandle Meathook and Nancy is Heather from Deadly Dreams. Discerning readers will note that Hendrix’s girls are named after the actors that portrayed their movie counterparts. Marilyn Burns played Sally in Texas Chainsaw, for example.
Confused yet? I definitely was at first. It took me awhile to understand the world Hendrix was trying to create, and I honestly still couldn’t tell the characters apart by the end. Their names were a giant blur of multiple syllables, so if they were up on the big screen with actual faces I would have had an easier time.
Now let’s talk genre. The Final Girl Support Group is clearly being marketed and shelved as horror, though that doesn’t feel quite right to me since I was never the least bit frightened. The jump scares that are so important to slasher movies didn’t translate to the page.
I did enjoy the L.A. setting, plus I do appreciate that this author has built himself a unique niche of horror-inspired thrillers. And the final scene for his final girls? It’s pretty darn killer.
My thanks to Berkley Publishing Group for providing an advance copy for review.
Blog:
https://www.confettibookshelf.com/ -
A lot of the same issues here as with TSBCGTSV...
It's obvious that Hendrix holds a lot of knowledge about the horror genre, but he also struggles to revamp the tropes he chooses to write about into something that is truly worth reading.
The idea to focus on final girls once their "15 minutes of fame" has ended is smart, but Hendrix's execution is harsher than any slasher death. His female characters and the messages surrounding their terrors are painfully shallow. Doubling down on the same old formulas, with trite little commentaries ~as a treat~ and shoving half-baked ideas into a new set-up, does not a self-aware horror make. By completely missing the opportunity to capitalize on the potential, TFGSG digs its own grave, and can only be described as a book that does the absolute bare minimum at best (imo ofc). -
**4.5-stars**
The Final Girl Support Group, Hendrix's 2021-release, revolves around the idea that final girls are actually real.
It proposes that the classic Slasher films we Horror Fans grew up on, and adore, are based on the real-life horror stories these women survived.
We're talking movies such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Leprechaun and Black Christmas.
Twenty-two years ago, Lynnette Tarkington, survived a massacre in her home. She is a real-life final girl.
Since that time she has developed some unhealthy habits trying to stay safe. She's a bit paranoid and has trouble letting people in.
The only people she trusts are the five other women, and their therapist, in the Final Girls Support Group.
This mixed-bag of trauma surivors have been meeting every month for more than a decade. They don't always get along, but in many ways, they need one another. Their therapist does a fairly good job of keeping them on track and seems to really care about their well-being.
When one of the women misses group, without explanation, Lynne fears the worst. It turns out, her fears are valid.
A monster has come to pick off the final girls one-by-one. Lynne immediately jumps into action. She's been anticipating this for years and has a solid survival plan in place, but will she be the last final girl?
I found this story to have a completely unique premise and loved the use of mixed media to build-out the lore behind this particular set of final girls.
As I have come to expect with Hendrix's novels, it is also full of his quick wit and dry humor. It's over-the-top, wild plotlines kept me completely engaged. Nostalgia for days!
I found this book to be extremely clever. The ending was insanity; so much fun. I am actually thinking about listening to the audiobook this Fall; maybe around Halloween.
It's definitely a story I wouldn't mind revisiting.
Thank you so much to the publisher, Berkley Books, for providing me a copy to read and review.
It was one of my most anticipated books of the year and Hendrix didn't disappoint! -
Grady's writing style is fun as always, and I appreciated the focus on older women who are left forgotten by mass audiences after their trauma has been monetized and exploited. However, I could tell that the intended theme for this book was to show these women looking out for one another, persisting through life despite their trauma, being more than just the horrific thing that happened to them, etc — this is made pretty obvious by his writing in the final pages — but as I reflect on this story, I don’t think those themes were actually shown at all. It’s a fun read, but falls short of the substantial message it tries to evoke.
-
Insert Capone's Oh No song from TikTok here......
This was definitely not it.
This was more like, me- the actual final girl- trying to survive the massacre that was this book! I'm the one who needs to attend a Final Girl Support Group after reading this, because this was soooo messy and not the good kind. Full review to come on my channel because this was so disappointing and underwhelming :(
Sad days. I'm starting to think books as slashers don't really work.
2 STARS
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Ugh, kill Em’ all, please.
⏰ 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫: A group of six real-life Final Girls get together monthly for support. A final girl is that last girl in a horror movie who survives but these women survived the real deal. But then final girls start dying, and the horror returns…
💡𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬: Oh this was disappointing. One of those books I don’t understand the high ratings. My issue started with this whole final girl premise - I understand this trope in movies, but in real life (or realistic fiction life)? I couldn’t name a single final girl. Unless there’s some weird dark web thing around this the premise doesn’t pass muster - who knows any REAL final girls? Can you name one? Do they have infamy where weirdos stalk them regularly (and aren’t there laws against that?) It wasn’t plausible in ANY way - first that these girls exist. Most serial killers IRL aren’t discovered by a “final girl” or killed by one. Then the fact that 6 of them all live in Los Angeles? Uhhh… not plausible.
From there my issue was with our protagonist who basically runs around town like a chicken with her head cut off (figuratively, not literally), accusing person after person and failing and flailing. I understood her mental health and OCD tendencies from surviving a horrible attack, but since the book didn’t focus on that she came across as just stupid. This book had such potential but just didn’t deliver for me.
The writing is shambolic - so much that I often had to review what I just read, with flashbacks and flash forwards, it’s important to give the reader context and it seemed disorganized and unconnected in places. Scattered.
Toward the end, I basically kind of hoped they ALL died.
𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗺𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝘁 𝗦𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗽����𝘆𝗠𝗮𝗴𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗺 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.
📚𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞: Mystery
😍𝐑𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨: If you “light” read and suspend a lot of disbelief.
🙅♀️ 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨���𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨: Anyone like me who can’t handle lack of realism.
Thank you to the author, NetGalley and Berkeley Publishing for my advanced copy in exchange for my always-honest review. -
The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
To get the most out of this story, it helps to be familiar with the horror slasher films of old, and their many sequels and crossovers, where an unimaginably horrible killer bloodily slaughters just about everybody before the last girl standing finally defeats him. Lynnette Tarkington survived her ordeal twenty two years ago and now attends monthly support group meetings with five other final girl survivors.
Lynnette is not living her best life ever after. Every moment of her every day and night consists of her obsessing on not allowing the next monster to reel her in. Nothing about her life is normal and her only real meaningful relationship is with her beloved houseplant, Fine. Without Fine and her monthly support group meetings, Lynnette's life would have no structure.
But now, one of the girls has missed the latest meeting and they soon realize why. Someone is out to end the final girls and everyone is suspect. Lynnette is on the run, possibly running right toward the monster or monsters who want to put an end to the final girls.
Lynette seems to come into her own when she realizes that all their lives are at stake and she has to track down whoever is behind the attempts on the lives of the remaining final girls. During her original ordeal, she was merely a bystander (or hanger...bad joke alert!) and almost doesn't qualify for final girl status. Now she's taking the bull by the horns and really meeting the challenge head on...she will not let the other down. Naturally, in horror slasher movie style, this story is gory, gross, gruesome and way over the top in almost every way but the humor is there, thanks to all the over the top-ness.
Pub: July 13, 2021
Thank you to Elisha at Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley for this ARC. -
"Men don't have to pay attention the way we do. men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we're female."
I'll give him this: Grady Hendrix knows how to write a compelling tale. I've read most of his books (with the exception of still needing to conquer
We Sold Our Souls), and each one seems to contain a message about society that gives me pause to ponder.
The Final Girl Support Group definitely covers female identity and the double standards given between men and women, even still today. While timely, I don't think the message was as strong as some of his previous novels, due to the convoluted nature of the story and the watered down characters.
My 3 star rating aside, this is totally a binge-worthy book. I quite literally had a hard time putting it down, as there wasn't a dull moment from start to finish. The first 10% of the book sets the tone and background, and from there it's a race to the finish line, and seeing who will make it out of the book alive. The pacing is so on point, that I would recommend it to anyone needing a book that will jump start your reading again after a slump. That is, if you can stomach the gory content...
I'm not squeamish when it comes to violence and gore in novels, so I sometimes struggle with providing accurate trigger warnings for readers who may be more sensitive to this type of content than I am, but this one is easy. If you have ANY type of triggers involving violence, murder, and gore, please think long and hard before you dive into this one. Obviously the title and synopsis give a heads up to the type of content within the pages, but there are also a few instances of animal abuse discussed vaguely, nothing on page in present time or detail though. Basically, if you're a fan of the old school slasher movies from the 70's, 80's, and 90's, proceed as you were.
Which brings me to one of my considerations: each final girl in this story is based off of one of the old school movies, and nothing from these storylines is really altered. Dani is Halloween, Marilyn is Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Julia is the Scream franchise, Heather seems tied to Nightmare on Elm Street (I found her storyline incredibly clever), and Adrienne is Friday the 13th. While I love the nostalgic feel brought to revisiting these tales and finding a way to attach new characters to them, I just wish they had been revamped a little bit to make it feel like there was more to the narrative than copying and pasting other people's stories and changing the names of the final girls. Either way, it's just a personal gripe and wholly opinion based critique.
I did find myself disappointed that the prologue basically hands you the identity of one of the people involved in "things", but I did find there were still a few twists along the way that caught me by surprise. While not my favorite Grady Hendrix novel, still a compulsive read that gave me all kinds of final girls nostalgia. Also, I will take Dani's advice of "One is none, and two is one" with me for the rest of my life.
*Many thanks to the publisher for providing my review copy. -
I wanted to love this sooooo badly but this book just wasn’t for me 😭😭😭
-
4.5 STARS
There is an ancient saying, which roughly translates to:
“Fortune will rain down on you if you don’t spit in a camel’s eye.”
Now, as a Westerner, it might sound silly, but think about it for a minute…How many billionaires do you know who is known for their camel-eye-spitting? Granted, I don’t know any of them, so there might be some kind of fetish club out there who cater for some, but the optimist in me would like to believe we live in a world where people refrain from spitting in a camel’s eye. I also prefer to not say anything about the camel-fuckers out there…sick bastards who can’t afford sheep…
Okay, I just grossed myself out a little...actually, a lot – just for the record, no sheep were harmed or impregnated during the writing of this review.
Moving on – there are a lot of ancient sayings that carry profound wisdom, but sometimes it gets lost in translation or just ignored as silly. I personally know a guy who found this out the hard way, when he ignored the Confucius saying:
“Man who walks backward through turnstile is going to Bangkok.”
I heard, just the other day, about an ancient scroll that was discovered recently and, while there are still some debate about some of the translations, one really spoke to me:
“Always wash your hands before you finger your…” wait, sorry, lost it there for a second, it says: “Always wash your hands before you take your finger food.”
While the writing is not totally clear on this, and Larry, just for the record, in these times ALL their food was finger food, asshole, so don’t even try me today, okay? Anyway, the arguments will continue, I’m sure, for decades to come. Why is it so unclear? Maybe it has been damaged by weather and erosion, maybe the writer didn’t have a decent handwriting and penmanship, hell, it could be as simple as the guy was a leftie…we will never know.
Fine, I’ll make my point, don’t be some damn impatient. What does any of this have to do with the story? Nothing, directly. However, if Grady Hendrix wrote this, you probably would have believed every damn word.
Something happens to me when I read one of his books. I have a very critical eye for mistakes, whenever I read something on Kindle I will actually stop and make a note about a missing comma, incorrect spelling or bad structure – in other words, I edit everything as I read it. When it comes to a Hendrix story, he has the magic to take me deep into the story, so much so that I will finish one of his books and not be able to tell you if there were any mistakes in it. I am not saying he is perfect, but I am saying that he is one of the very few authors whose words override this instinct.
So, instead of rehashing the blurb, or telling you anything that the hundreds of other reviewers already told – probably better than I can – I will say only this:
It was tons and tons of fun, you find yourself hiding your phone somewhere close to your computer screen at work because you don’t want to stop reading.
This story is clever and very, very well written. The only reason it loses half a star is because the final showdown felt just a little too Hollywood for me, but I was entertained and surprised in the best possible way. Horror fans, it is a no-brainer, just read this story.
My thanks to Grady Hendrix for this ARC – my opinions are my own. -
oooh, goodreads choice awards finalist for best horror 2021! WHAT WILL HAPPEN LET’S FIND OUT!
Curiosity was the faceless monster that stuck a pitchfork through the cat.
i tore through this book so quickly that, although i had a good time reading it, it's already starting to vanish outta my brain:
in the real world, slumber parties, homecoming dances, and summer camps are not typically plagued by single-minded spree-killers who are themselves eventually killed by plucky heroines, earning them "final girl" status. entering into the world of this book, you have to accept that the final girl scenario occurs with some regularity and slasher movies are more or less documentaries of these crimes.
but back in our world, a world where the book
Final Girls already exists, do we neeeed another version of the same story—a murder mystery about someone systematically tracking down and killing these final girl survivors? i love grady hendrix enough to say YES without hesitation, but to be honest, i'm already mixing the two books up in my head. i guess it's a good thing i haven't yet read
The Last Final Girl.
i thought that the idea of a support group for these survivors of horrific crimes was a promising concept, because we rarely get psychological closure from slasher films—to see the toll that must naturally follow once the shock and adrenaline wears off and the triumph of conquering one's adversary fades beneath the reality of having watched friends die, having faced one's own death and having taken a life—an altogether different shade of horror. i thought this book would have the same kind of vibe as seanan mcguire's wayward children series, where individuals who'd gotten to live, briefly, in magical fantasy worlds became depressed and pissed off after returning to the drab real world, but it's not really about the support group, although it is very much about living with a traumatic past, and how trauma can make someone paranoid and terrified of normal life, or a complete badass, or both of these things at once.If diamonds are a girl's best friend, then reliable handguns with a lot of stopping power are a final girl's.
hendrix always delivers these stylish and high-concept horror stories, and i really appreciate his referential flourishes and his design sensibilities, from the ephemera meta-materials sprinkled throughout the novel to how he frames his acknowledgment pages.
this one seemed less inventive than some of his other books, but if i hadn't already read
Final Girls, i probably would have enjoyed it more. i'm rounding a 3.5 to a 4 for prior good deeds and i'm hoping his next one, whenever and whatever it is, blows my mind.
*******************************************
i was going to wait until spooktober to read this, but instead it was a five-hour distraction from this terrible heat and i'm okay with that.
come to my blog! -
3.5 stars
What if all our favorite slasher movies were based on real-life cases?
And that's the premise of this book.
I liked the clever spin on the slasher genre and I liked all the nods to iconic horror films. I also liked how self-aware Hendrix was about the violence towards women in those films and how he addressed it without becoming preachy.
Part of the genre is mindless violence. But another part is that we like to see our worst fears played out in front of us. We like to run those worst-case scenarios in our heads to figure out how we would escape the monster. We scream at the characters to run and we scoff when they take their first wobbly step into the basement.
We imagine ourselves as the final girl.
So. This was clever.
Buuuuut. There was something missing, too.
I wish I had cared more about the characters, but I just couldn't. A big part of that might have been because we're stuck inside the head of Lynette for the entire book, and out of all the final girls, she's the least interesting and/or sympathetic. She's completely crazy-pants to the point that she's an OCD survivalist hermit whose only friend is a plant she thinks is sentient.
The rest of the girls (women) in the story are scarred and banged up, but they're all functioning humans.
Not Lynette.
And that's who we go on this ride with.
The grand finale with the killer is pretty good, but the wrap-up has an afterschool special vibe that didn't quite do it for me.
However, this was a winner for me in the sense that I'm really interested in reading some of Hendrix's older books. I've been hearing about this author for quite a while now, so it was great to finally see what it is that makes his take on things so unique.
Recommended. -
Unfortunately, this just wasn't for me. And I am sure this is really "it's not you, it's me" case.
In all honesty, the reason I picked up The Final Girl Support Group was the hype it was getting even before it's release, due to the author's popularity.
I usually love horror movies, slashers and gory are my jam, but here in this book... although I do appreciate the action... most of the time I felt lost.
From the very beginning something felt off. It was probably the writing style I just couldn't get into to save my life and the narrator and her craziness/paranoia didn't click with me either.
I am aware that anyone in her place would lose their sanity too.
There were also so many characters, so many final girls obviously based on already created final girls in cult horror movies we all seen or at least heard of, that it took me way much time to acknowledge them.
There was an aha-moment that surprised me in a good way, but that was it.
If I am being honest I just didn't care. I didn't care about the plot, I didn't care about the characters, I didn't care about the end, and I feel sorry I wasn't more invested.
It was clear to me around 15% that this book wasn't for me, but I wanted to finish it as I had an ARC.
After I finally pushed through it I couldn't believe it had only 352 pages. It felt like it was long as an eternity.
So my conclusion is, once again, that this book just wasn't for me and I don't think I will read more of Grady Hendrix' work. -
I didn’t like this book. I wanted to give it 3 stars but I couldn’t find enough things I liked about it to do so. It started out okay and plummeted for me. It’s basically a miracle I even finished it. I almost DNF’d about 4 or 5 times.
My biggest complaint was the ‘humor’. There were so many crude lines it was almost cringe-worthy.
A lot of the humor was someone telling the main character not to do something and her doing it anyways. It’s only funny the first time. Not the 20th.
There was a particular part about a guy pleasuring himself to graphic porn videos? 🤷♀️ TMI. 🤦♀️
I can’t find the exact wording but there was a line that basically said ‘I turned around and noticed him staring at my ass.’ For a book that claims to be very female forward, parts like these make that contradicting in my opinion.
Then I found this incredible line and I felt hope again! ….And then it was over-described and ruined it. 😩
‘Stitched with ruby-red roses that bulge like bloody organs,’ 😍
‘Festooned with looping vines and flowering garlands that look like intestines.’ 😩😩😩
I just feel like the writing in this book was pretty bad.
I don’t think I cared about a single character. In fact, I didn’t root for a single one of them. The character development was pretty weak.
‘The bad guy’ and motive were eye rolling and I didn’t care. I didn’t think the book ended very strong unfortunately.
I’ve seen people’s reviews who really enjoyed and zero disrespect to anyone who liked it. 😊 So if you decide to read this one I hope you like it more than I did! ❤️ -
A final girl is the sole survivor of a horror movie...
the one who fought back, AGAIN and AGAIN defeating the killer, to be left standing, bloodied and bruised, but ALIVE, as the credits roll.
One problem…I never liked slasher movies like Friday the 13th, Chucky or Scream.
Too gory, too silly, too OVER THE TOP.
So, WHY did I read this when I was invited to? Simple.
I LOVED ❤️ the author’s previous book-“The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires”!!
So, I had to give it a try!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Unfortunately, although this book pokes fun at these movies, it lacks the HUMOR and LOVABLE characters of the other.
I did not feel like I really got to know the FINAL GIRLS, and although they meet the first Thursday of every month with their therapist, I didn’t feel the same camaraderie as in the book I mentioned-
Not even when Lynnette Tarkington, one of the survivors, realizes that the members of the group have become targets for a new deranged killer, and she makes it her mission to save them.
Perhaps it is because we mostly got to know the others through pictures of excerpts of police transcripts, newspaper articles and emails, and on my KINDLE the font was too small and too dark to read most of them. I may have missed out on some of the story because of this...and my lack of knowledge regarding the Classic Slasher films!
Therefore if you are like me, I recommend you get this one in BOOK format over digital for that reason-if this is a book on your Must read list!
This book is gory, silly and OTT-just like the slasher movies-as it is meant to be!
But, this time, my lack of enthusiasm for those movies, did translate to my lack of enjoyment of the book!
I am just not the right reader THIS time, though true fans of the pop culture of slasher films, should enjoy this a lot more!
Thank You to Elisha at Berkley for providing a gifted copy through NetGalley.
It was my pleasure to offer a candid review!
NOW AVAILABLE! -
Great premise, but not what I expected, and sadly as much as I liked the first quarter, the rest just felt the same and I was bored.
Sometimes unlikable characters still make a fascinating read, it's not the case for me here. I didn't care for any of the Final Girls. It's possible that the narration made it worse with nonstop panic emotions throughout the story. I felt exhausted and couldn't wait for it to be over. I didn't care who lives or dies either, sorry (not sorry).🤪🩸
This is my first book by the author and maybe I went in with the wrong expectations. I thought it'll have some fantasy element to it, but it feels like an unrealistic thriller than a horror. -
Any fan of slasher films will know what a final girl is. She’s the nice, sane one who escapes harm for most of the film while her friends and/or family are butchered, only to have a confrontation with the killer at the end. She will be the only survivor of the massacre...unless the killer comes back from the dead over and over in an endless amount of sequels.
The Final Girl Support Group is a...well, it’s just like it sounds: A support group for Final Girls, a group of women in L.A. who have all survived horrible attacks, their tragedies having been turned into movie series offers (and countless sequels).
They meet with a therapist on a monthly basis to discuss the trauma that they still face after years and years of sessions. The monthly sessions seem to have run their course. However, after one of the women doesn’t show up, Final Girl Lynnette Tarkington has a bad feeling.
Turns out she is right to worry. It seems as though someone knows about the group’s therapy sessions, and wants to kill them all.
What proceeds is an often silly and unrealistic journey as Lynnette does crazy thing after crazy thing to try and save herself and the other final girls. Some of it is amusing, and I even chuckled a few times, but other parts were too absurd for me to buy into.
As a fan of some of the 70’s and 80’s slasher classics, what I wholeheartedly appreciate is how author Grady Hendrix paid homage to those films. Several winks are give to the reader. A few examples: Heather is a final girl that inspired the Dream King/Deadly Dreams series (like Heather Langenkamp’s character, Nancy Thomas, in “A Nightmare on Elm Street”). Adrienne worked as a camp counselor at Camp Red Lake (like Adrienne King’s character, Alice, who worked at Camp Crystal Lake in “Friday the 13th”).
The chapter titles are also a fun and clever nod to these films. Examples include: The Final Girl Support Group 3-D, The Final Girl Support Group’s New Nightmare, and my favorite... The Final Girl Support Group XXI: The Final Chapter II.
The final confrontation is a bit long-winded, which also sometimes happens in these slasher movies.
I think plenty of classic slasher/horror fans will gobble this book up, so I definitely suggest they read other reviews and check it out, even if I personally found it to be much more OTT and unrealistic than I expected. I still found it entertaining enough at the end of the day.
⚠️ Not for the squeamish. 🩸🔪🪝
Thank you to Elisha at Berkley for sending me a widget of the ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The book will be published on: 7/13/21.
Review also posted at:
https://bonkersforthebooks.wordpress.com -
This is a Horror Thriller. This is a fast pace book that is full of twists and turns and suspense. I cannot say much about this book without giving something away. This book is all about a support group of girls where all the girls/women in the group as survived something really bad. This book is told by one of the girls in the group. This book kept me guessing and not knowing. I really enjoyed this book, and the wild ride it took me on. I was kindly provided an e-copy of this book by the publisher (Berkley Books) or author (Grady Hendrix) via NetGalley, so I can give honest review about how I feel about this book. I want to send a big Thank you to them for that.
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A solid 3 star book. Enjoyed the story, good sense of humor, some twists and turns to the end. Plus, we met the author a few years ago at BookCon, and he was a really nice person, so I’m a fan. Recommended read.
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Are you a fan of the old slasher movies? Did you find yourself screaming at the teenagers not to go into the basement? The movies where there would be one lone girl who survived the massacre by killing the deranged monster. She is what’s referred to as a Final Girl. This is their story!
Lynette is a final girl. Though some others have a hard time calling her that since she never actually killed her monster. But she is part of the support group with five other Final Girls. Though it seems that the ties that bind are quickly fraying.
These women can never seem to completely move forward as there is always some fan who wants their moment of fame by bringing the past to life. Could one of these deranged Final Girl Buff’s now be hunting the remaining girls? Is Lynette the only one who believes they are in danger? Can she save her fellow survivors before it’s too late?
It’s difficult to put in words how I felt about this book. I thought the writing was great and it held my attention and kept me wanting to know how it all turned out.
So perhaps it was the subject matter itself. I was a fan of these movies when I was younger. But maybe not so much anymore.🤷🏻♀️. I do like my thrillers dark, but this seemed especially dark and somewhat gruesome as the massacres were detailed.
This was my first read by this author, and I am definitely interested to see what he comes up with next.
A buddy read with Susanne!
Posted to:
https://books-are-a-girls-best-friend...
Thank you to Elisha at Berkley Publishing via NetGalley for an ARC to read and review. -
Congrats to the 2021 Goodreads Choice ✨WINNER✨ in Horror!
Neve says don’t disappoint us, Grady.
This has been a year of first reads by an author for me, so of course I was glad to finally begin my first by Grady Hendrix novel. But despite my lack of first-hand experience, the stories by Mr. Hendrix have reputations that precede them. From a haunted IKEA (
Horrorstör) to a vampire-hunting book club (
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires) to demon-possessed teenagers (
My Best Friend's Exorcism), going into The Final Girl Support Group I was expecting a level of, well, batshit-edness to accompany the story. And in that sense I can’t say I was wrong at all.
You don’t get more unreliable of a narrator than Lynette Tarkington, and that’s for good reason. Every character in this group of women, the titular Final Girl Support Group, is dealing with immense trauma even decades after their lives were last in danger. Lynette watched her family and boyfriend die violent deaths as a teenager and has coped by trying to control every detail of her life to prevent herself from ever feeling that helpless and vulnerable again. She barely leaves her house, and when she does follows a neurotic routine meant to throw would-be assassins off her trail. After years and years, all the women in the group are into the middle of their lives, but Lynette is the one who most openly wears her inability to move beyond her past on her sleeve.
But just like that…..things start to go wrong. The Final Girls are being picked off. From arrests to deaths and other means of incapacitation, what Lynette believes more than anything is someone is trying to take them out. As she goes on the run, she’ll have to track down both old friends and enemies, revisit suppressed pain and hopefully be able to save the people she cares about this time around.
I think my biggest complaint with this book is that I got lost a few too many times while reading it. I would have to go back and either re-read or rewind the audiobook in order to make sure I didn’t miss something big. Especially in the beginning, a lot of the exposition felt jumpy, and I’m still not convinced I caught everything I was supposed to. I guess this may have been a creative decision to reflect Lynette’s scattered state of mind, but for me it just felt too disorganized to be an effective means of storytelling.
Between chapters there was usually some kind of medical report or advertisement for any of the movie franchises the Final Girls took part in in the aftermath of their assaults. I thought this was a really clever way to relay information to the reader, giving us useful background not just on the events that led each of the women to this point, but the culture of the time they lived in. Like a lot of the media we consume, both fictional and real, there’s a societal fascination with deranged murderers and their unsuspecting female victims. The author offers us not commentary on this phenomena, but reflects our own fixations back at us, leaving the audience to decide their own complicity for themselves.
Obviously I can’t compare this to his other works, but what’s clear in this absolutely insane story is that Hendrix is an old hand at horror and slasher films. He knows the tropes well enough to play into them or against them on whim, and for the most part I think he’s successful in executing some of the biggest twists of the book. A few of the characters later on felt like curveballs that weren’t properly explored. But overall I thought this was a really brilliant concept that could have used some more fine-tuning in the execution.
Thanks to
Kristen &
Janine for picking this book for their Not Yo Mama’s Book Club in July!
**For more book talk & reviews,
follow me on Instagram at @elle_mentbooks! -
I guess 3.5 Stars! I was hoping for more so I don’t know. I liked the notebook pages, notes, etc. I loved the references to Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Scream killers, Harry Warden and there may me more but I skimmed a bit 😬
Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾 -
I fluctuated between being interested.. to mildly interested .. to bored .. to a twisty “oh, okayyyy ?/!?ending” .. to ..
“Ok, that’s over!” -
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DNF @ 10%
I feel like Riley Sager ran with this concept and did it one better with his book, FINAL GIRLS. I get what Hendrix was trying to do here and it's a fascinating premise, but one thing I've noticed about his books is that it's like he can't decide whether he wants to do homage or parody and kind of tries for both, which ends up making the mood of his books very... uh, weird.
Don't get me wrong. I liked his vampire slaying book and his book about old school horror and pulp is probably one of my favorite books-about-books titles to date. But this one was a lot of tell and not show and ended up coming across as kind of ham-fisted. I couldn't get into it.
2 stars -
as a slasher film enthusiast this was really fun, i liked that each character had a final girl story that was basically a classic slasher girl film but just a bit more realistic. i think the only thing was that the story felt a little long around the 60%-70% mark and a lot of that chunk could be taken out because it felt really long and i just feel like a lot of it wasn’t needed. this book was super fun tho like i said, i have to go back and read his book from last year and i definitely can’t wait to see what he does this year
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For the first hundred pages of the book I was pretty content to give this book three stars. It wasn't giving what I was told it would give, but it was also a good enough time.
By the halfway point I had settled on two stars. It was clear to me that Hendrix was just not for me, he was for the people and that too was fine. I thought that the writing was serviceable if not remarkable. At that point I was willing to look past the fact that Adrienne, our black final girl, was the first girl to be murdered. I was even willing to overlook this fictional black person over looking their trauma being depicted by a white woman so they could get a bigger check. But when she showed up as an emotional support negro in the climax as a hallucination to get the main character to keep going? I said sir you have officially done too much.
Reader I have never wanted to chuck a book so desperately in my life.
The way that I was bored for most of the book was enough to have me never read another Grady Hendrix book again, but the way he choose to end this book and tie up the loose ends? That shit should be illegal.
I do not recommend anyone spend their money to read this. If it's possible to get it from the library or borrow a copy from a friend before you purchase I say do that, because I think this is ultimately going to be a waste of a lot of people's time. -
I had a hard time putting this book down. It kept me guessing throughout and was all around pretty good. It wasn’t as gory as I was expecting. I don’t normally read “slasher” books, so I didn’t know what to expect going in, but it read like a normal suspense book to me. Looking forward to trying more from this author.
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Lynette Tarkington is a ‘final girl’, the one who survives a massacre, a bloodbath. She meets five other final girls with shocking backstories for group therapy with Dr Carol Elliott and when one of them fails to turn up and then proves to be dead, Lynette realises ‘they're coming for them’, one by one as history repeats itself.
Well, given that slasher movies are the central premise you know what you’re going to get! I thought I may have to read this with my eyes closed (yep, that’ll work!) and from behind the safety of a mental sofa but no! Yes, your jaw drops and I’m not going to pretend it’s pretty in places because it’s so not but I can’t say I find it especially horrifying or terrifying but perhaps I’m not meant to! This is because it’s so over the top in places and the action, especially in the dramatic conclusion, is so far fetched I can’t take it particularly seriously! There are certainly some very movie worthy scenes that’s for sure.
I like Lynette as a central character, the portrayal of her living with the fear and heightened survival skills is very good and I particularly like that the author creates tough survivor women and not victims. The dangers they’re in builds well and there are some good twists and turns in the storytelling as you try to work out who is picking them off and why. The plot does drift into the utterly weird and total lunacy at times with Creepy/Crazy Chrissy and her collection of souvenirs being a case in point.
For the most part the pace is fast but there are occasions where there is over detail or too much expectation which halts the flow. There are a lot of characters to get your head around but you get there in the end.
Overall, if you like your novels dark and gritty and don’t mind some violence and gore then this may fit the bill! If you’re a fan of slasher movies then this is certainly up your alley as it’s a pastiche or homage to the genre and probably a bit tongue in cheek.
With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Titan Books for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review. -
2.5 stars. After the stellar Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, it's tempting to call this a real disappointment. Though as I've been thinking about it, I find myself shifting that narrative around and instead saying SBCGTSV was a standout for Hendrix and this is mostly a return to form.
Despite being a horror lover, I passed on Hendrix's WE SOLD OUR SOULS because after his two previous novels I felt like I got it. He's great on premise and has some real fun with the genre. But I was feeling frustrated by the lack of character development, by these books that made me feel like they should just be a movie instead. And that's what we're back to here. This is Hendrix's highest concept yet and it is not the easiest to pull off.
In a way this is an entirely speculative universe, one where the slasher movies of the 80's were all based on true stories. That's not one but two pretty big steps away from reality and when you stop to think about it for a while, it's really weird. It means that the superfans of slasher movies are also superfans of actual crimes. It gets very muddy very fast in terms of what all this means and while he plays with the repercussions of it sometimes, it ends up being just a device for the plot rather than a way to explore what horror fandom is.
Our protagonist is Lynnette, who for various reasons that will be revealed over the book, sees herself as not a "real" final girl, even though she has also based her entire life around it. She has no friends, no connections, no job (I think?), and lives every single minute with the expectation that someone is about to kill her. The only people she interacts with are the other Final Girls and their therapist at group. As you can imagine, this kind of trauma takes a real toll on people. Especially since this isn't garden variety trauma but trauma where someone killed all your friends/family and then comes back at least once to do it all again. But it's also been a couple of decades since this happened and it's unclear whether the group is really helpful. It's unclear how someone like Lynnette would actually function in the world, but the book is not concerned about that, it just needs her to be this obsessive because it will fuel the plot. And that is how basically everything goes.
Lynnette is a machine. A protect and run machine. And she runs with such certainty from one sequence to the next, even though each sequence ends with all her assumptions being proved entirely wrong. She never seems to fully consider that since this has not worked out so well the several previous times she's tried it maybe she should take another approach. Because, well, the book requires her to move like a shark, never stopping, never pausing, always running. This gets old, but the cycle just keeps repeating. The sequences are very heavy on action, which is typical of much of Hendrix's pre-SBCGTSV work. And ultimately we do not have much character development here. The characters are broadly drawn, but there is not much subtlety or much useful internal thought.
There is a lot to learn about this universe and it is not the easiest to pick up. By halfway through the book I finally had a handle on who each of the final girls was, though I still couldn't connect them back to their various origin stories. There were so many names of killers thrown around and I couldn't remember which was which. It really could have used one of those character description pages some books have outlining it for us.
Besides the way it is all about slasher movies and acts of mass violence and fandom without ever really interrogating any of these things, the thing that bothered me most that I suspect will be an issue for some readers (especially who are not horror regulars but were inducted by SBCGTSV) is the use of "crazy," "psycho," and other terms. In this book, killers are crazy. That is why they are killers. The book seems to understand that mental health is a thing, as many would suspect Lynnette herself has a few possible diagnoses like Anxiety, OCD, or even some other neurodivergent possibilities, but there is a line where after all of that it is just crazy. And the term is thrown around quite often. It's really weird, honestly, for a book based on group therapy and mental health to have so much of it live in a kind of imaginary world where "crazy" people are walking around just waiting for the trigger that will turn them into mass murderers with bizarrely creative ways to kill people. I know that for horror a lot of content warnings, particularly around violence, are assumed. But this is one that I put in a different bucket and I think it's worth stating. (There's also a point where I couldn't tell if someone was talking about how they were about to kill a woman or about to rape her.)
I read a whole lot of horror last year, plenty good and plenty bad. And I've been watching horror movies more, too. There is a lot I love about the genre, but I saw basically none of that here. Too serious to be fun but too fun to be serious, tonally it's a weird one. And while I think there's a lot to dive into with the topics, I didn't see anything here that made me look at any of it in a new way or dive into the parts of it I most enjoy. It bites off more than it can chew and if you're a horror person, the twists become pretty easy to see coming once you get into the story. While in previous books like Horrorstor or My Best Friend's Exorcism I would happily watch the movie version, I don't think a movie of this would be all that fun.
