⛰ What it’s about
“Like his bestselling novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix’s latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films—movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.
Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.
But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.”
📖 Here’s Grady Hendrix talking about the origin for the story:
🔍 How I discovered it
I read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (like a lot of people did; it was a NYT Bestseller). And while looking for a thriller/horror crossover, I found that Hendrix was coming out with a new book. I’ve since interviewed him, which you can check out below!https://www.buzzsprout.com/1841589/9413772-trying-to-turn-books-into-movies-and-other-horrors-grady-hendrix-part-1?client_source=small_player&iframe=true&referrer=https://www.buzzsprout.com/1841589/9413772-trying-to-turn-books-into-movies-and-other-horrors-grady-hendrix-part-1.js?container_id=buzzsprout-player-9413772&player=small
🧠 Deeper thoughts
It’s clear that there’s this obsession with death throughout this story (duh, DG, its horror). But what I mean is specifically death as a culmination. Most horror novels slow down the moments before death, only to speed up once that death has occurred “on screen.” Hendrix explores this idea that, despite spending most of our lives afraid of catastrophe, most of us die slowly and unmajestically.
It’s also interesting that this story leans closer to a thriller than a traditional horror novel, at least at the beginning. I actually found it really refreshing to have a horror backdrop with a thriller-style mystery. In this way, our characters are active in a way that some characters in horror can feel passive or reactionary. This goes back to Hendrix’s knowledge of horror tropes and archetypes and the ways in which he’s modifying and subverting them.
👍 What I Liked About It
I thought this was a unique play on a genre. It almost felt like the real world implications behind the people who survive the fictional world of outlandish horror movies in which the monster requires several bullets to the chest and an hour or two under water but their body’s are never discovered. Dun! Dun! Dun!
This is more like a real(ish) world survival after the movie credits roll.
Well, here, I’ll let Grady Hendrix tell you what it’s about.
In that way, I wonder if it’s not more a thriller with horror elements. In any event, here’s part one of my interview with Grady Hendrix.
👎 What didn’t work for me
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and thought it was well-executed. And I really liked the way Hendrix subverts a lot of genre norms while continuing to play by the rules and conventions of the horror novel (which we discuss in this interview).
That being said, somewhere in the middle sagged a bit for me. The characters just never fully leapt off the page like they did in The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.
With all that out there, the ending of this book was phenomenal and well-paced.
🧐 Questions to consider while you read
How is the author using the horror genre in a new way?
How does author develop the character in chapter one?
Does the author achieve his thematic goal?
What comment is the author making about gender in thriller and horror stories?
👏 Critical Praise
“The Final Girl Support Group sizzles with action, originality, and a gleaming concept sharp as a scalpel.”—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Pray for morning, wish for speed, and be as quiet as you can, it doesn’t matter—Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group already knows where you live and breathe.”—Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians
“A great read…[Hendrix] excels at writing horror humor… His characters are funny and real, though at least one will definitely lose a limb at some point…Though the final girls’ plight has all the scares of great horror fiction, there is an element of truth in their situation that will be recognizable to anyone who has experienced real trauma.” –The New York Times
“Equal parts thrilling and darkly funny.” – Time
“A savvy summer slasher … continues his winning run of meta horror novels…a wickedly entertaining page-turner.” –USA Today
“It’s not necessary to be a fan of slasher movies to enjoy this very clever, gleefully violent, self-aware deconstruction of the genre.” – The Guardian
“Grady Hendrix has demonstrated a remarkable facility for suspense…With his latest work, The Final Girl Support Group, he’s turned that talent into a nearly book-length workout, an exercise in go-go acceleration that steps on the gas soon after it begins and doesn’t stop until the final pages.” – The A.V. Club
