For a breakdown of my rating criteria, check out My Review & Rating System
Book: 🔪🔪🔪🔪.5
Final Girl: 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤
It started as a summer fling. Then the Slashers arrived. Cherry saved Sloan. Now, they’re Final Girls in love. But is there more to the story?
A YA Thriller that I personally could not put down. A dark and suspenseful story with a believable but unreliable narrator, which kept me guessing until the very end.
Movie Pairing: Fear Street trilogy
Full Review (Spoilers) Below
Premise
Sloan and Cherry met as camp counselors. They fell in love. It was the perfect summer fling. Then the Slashers arrived. Cherry saved Sloan: Two Final Girls; One Epic Romance. Only, as Sloan struggles to unlock her missing memories from that night, she’s beginning to wonder if that’s truly the whole story. Or if it’s the story, at all. Soon, she starts questioning everything she believes, and she can’t help but question Cherry, too.
Sloan’s quest for answers slowly digresses into a spiral of confusion and suspicion. But is she on to something? Or is her paranoia leading her down a dark road with no exit?
Full Review (SPOILERS)
Killer Motivation
“Can you feel it? Is it in your blood?”
This is the first time I’ve encountered Eco-Terrorism in a slasher plot, and I think that on its own, that motivation could have worked out well. Instead, it got a little convoluted and even silly when the “soulmate” and ritual aspects came to light. Nonetheless, I appreciate that Dugan left us with a bit of an ambiguous ending, allowing me to brush off the strange bits as just a particular brand of delusion attached to these slashers; one that I don’t really need to understand to enjoy the story. They’re just a bunch of brainwashed psycho-killers.
But the important part isn’t the motivation itself, but how the motivation impacts Sloan’s ability to think clearly.
Slashers don’t NEED motivation. That’s part of what makes them so scary. Random, senseless, violence. Sloan, however, NEEDS the slashing to have a motivation. She needs to not only make sense of what happened to her, but to give it purpose. And ultimately that’s what breaks her. That, in my opinion, is the true brilliance of this book.
The Terrible Place
Cherry accelerated, and the sight of the camp gave way to a couple miles of pine trees and brush.
Listen, I LOVE a Return to the Terrible Place plot twist. I also love a memory loss plot, so making The Return the trigger for the memories to flow back is always an easy win for me. I loved it in Final Girls, and I loved it in this one (maybe more, because Sloan stumbling into the camp by accident was a really nice touch).
We don’t spend a lot of time at Camp Money Springs (what a strange name!), but pulling us there for the big climactic ending was a great call. There, we learn that Cherry’s version of events are TRUE (Hooray!), and yet, by the time this is revealed, Sloan is so far gone that she interprets them as false by attributing false meaning to them, planted there by Morte Hominus (the Slashers). This made for a dark as hell ending, and I LOVED it.
Weapons/Shock Value
Sixteen stitches holding her together when she could not do so herself.
Speaking of the ending… OMFG. So dark. So shocking. So emotional. And bloody too.
Being that this is more of a YA psychological thriller than a horror-slasher, there wasn’t a ton of gore, but I don’t think the story needed that. Plus, it did make the ending feel even more gruesome than it otherwise would have! I read the second half of the last chapter with my hand clasped firmly over my mouth, heart thudding. I hoped against hope that Cherry would make it, and Sloan would have to finally face the fact that her inability to move forward destroyed everything. But Cherry dying was maybe the only way this story really could have ended, regardless of how heartbroken it left me.
The Victims
Sloan had donated all of her funeral clothes the moment she stepped out of the eighth service in as many days.
Since this one is very light on the slasher details, we don’t get to learn a whole lot about the victims of the Camp Money Springs massacre. The snippets we get paint a picture of a relatively diverse group of teens, hanging out, doing/chatting about normal teen stuff. Debating environmental issues around a fire, like they understand the world better than adults (didn’t we all think that at some point?), braiding each other’s hair, and falling in love.
The real victim by the end of the book is Cherry. She was also Camp Money Spring’s real Final Girl. Yes, Sloan survived, but Cherry saved her. And then Sloan killed Cherry. It’s a shocking ending, yes, but it’s also such a sad one. Both girls made it out of the camp alive, only to have what happened there completely destroy them, in one way or another.
Cherry would have died for Sloan. And in the end, she kind of did.
The Final Girl
If I had to write an essay about what I did on my summer vacation, it would say ‘survived a mass murder’
Yes, Sloan survived a mass murder. Technically, she is one of two Final Girls in the book. But if we’re being brutally honest, Cherry was the only real Final Girl. The hero of the story. And although she dies at the end, there’s something to be said for NOT dying at the hands of the Slashers, even if it ended up being because of them.
So I am going to make an executive decision (it’s my blog, after all), and label Sloan our Protagonist, but Cherry our Final Girl. Accordingly, the score card below will rate Cherry, not Sloan.
Final Girl Scorecard
🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤
Character Development: At first, Cherry seems controlling, co-dependant, and rude. But the more we get to know her, and see her reactions to Sloan’s digression, we get to see a softer side of her. She is protective (maybe to a fault), tough, and loyal (definitely to a fault!). I’m glad we got to see a rounded out character before we lost her (1)
Strengths/weaknesses: Cherry is protective, tough, and loyal. All great qualities, BUT this can sometimes veer into her being controlling, contrarian, and self-sacrificing. All of these characteristics are used to create a realistic and sympathetic character (1)
Intersectionality: Her queerness is at the forefront of the story, but is never used against her. She never seems to be being punished for it. Neither is it her sole identity. In fact, there’s more emphasis on her grief, class, and politics (1)
Smarts: Cherry remains level-headed and reasonable as Sloan spirals. When keeping Sloan close proves to not be working, she tries a new approach. She’s flexible and observant and a critical-thinker. No doubt that’s how she was able to survive a massacre, and save her gf while she was at it! (1)
Badassness: Cherry is so awesome. She stands up for herself. She’s unafraid to tell it like it is. She’s tough. And yet, she doesn’t let any of that stop her from being a good person, and a loving partner. (1)
Final Thoughts
This was a dark, suspenseful YA Thriller that had me hooked right from the start… and gasping at the end. I found both girls to be realistic and sympathetic, and even though I wouldn’t necessarily classify Sloan as a Final Girl, I’m glad the book was told from her perspective. It made for a page-turner of a mystery and a very interesting look at trauma. While the ending broke my heart, I must admit it was too powerful not to love.
*****
Read this one? Share your own thoughts in the comments!
And for more bloody good fun, join my Final Girl Bookclub on Fable to read along with me. See you in the threads!
Slashing Pages 