The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Warnings:

Violence

Death

Blood

Drug Abuse

Betrayal!

I heard good things about this book so I picked it up. And then it sat in my Books to Read stacks for... a few years, I think. Finally decided to read it and could not put it down.

Lynnette is a final girl. A final girl is a horror (slasher) movie trope where one girl survives the movie. Usually a fresh-faced virgin. Lynette, and her fellow Final Girls, attend a support group to deal with their trauma. When one of them is murdered, Lynnette comes to the conclusion that someone is trying to take them all out. 

I'm not going to go any further into the plot because the book is still new enough that I don't want to spoil anything for anyone. But shit, this book is full of twists and turns. I was shocked face Pikachu for probably the last half of the book. Just, wow. It was like a horror movie, but better. The book took a bunch of horror movie tropes and made them more interesting. 

I liked how these girls weren't survivors of horror movies. These girls were survivors of horrific crimes that were made into horror movies. Which gave them added trauma. I don't mean I like them having trauma. I mean I like how it showed how little people care about the trauma survivors of these types of crime go through. Take the popularity of the True Crime genre. Which yes, I watch and read things of that genre, but I will admit that sometimes it goes too far. And this book, in my opinion, kind of put the spotlight on that. And how people tend to focus on the killers and not the victims. There is a comment made at the end of the book about how in slasher movies, the victims (aside from the Final Girl) are only given first names and you don't get to know them. But all my thoughts about that are probably better done in a post all on its own. Or a Tumblr rant. 

The Final Girls are all unique. Not in the movies. In the movies it is usually a fresh-faced white girl virgin who is a bit sexy but in that girl next-door sort of way. The real-life final girls are unique. Well... One is black. One is a lesbian. But still, they're not all white. Which is something. And they all deal with their trauma in different ways. 

The writing is excellent. Kept me on the edge of my seat for the entire book. I don't remember a lot of descriptions, but that isn't a deal breaker for me. Also, there might have been descriptions, my brain just didn't retain the knowledge. It does that sometimes.  

I'll leave off on this by saying I highly recommend this book to horror movie fans. Horror book fans. And maybe even true crime fans. 

“I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library.” 

– Jorge Luis Borges