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Premise

Decades ago, Lynette became a real-life Final Girl. Today, she’s a paranoid recluse. The only place she feels safe is The Final Girl Support Group (FGSG), but when a fellow member is killed, everything changes. Because Lynette has been looking over her shoulder for years, sure her next sequel could come at any moment, and this, she realizes, is it.

The Final Girls are being targeted. Lynette is sure of it. But no one believes her… not even when her apartment is shot up by a sniper, taking down a second group member. Which means it’s up to her to save the day, the way she was never able to as a young woman when her Slashers came-a-knocking. This time, Lynette doesn’t want to just survive. She wants to fight. And it’s a fight she’s been preparing for for decades. Losing is not an option.

Full Review (SPOILERS)

The Killer

Skye and I will be heroes. People will be talking about the statement we made here for years to come. You’re just pointless nostalgia.

Seeking fame, driven by hate, these killers feel like a play on the Ghostface tradition of two angry and entitled killers, targeting a woman (or, in this case, women) they perceive as wronging them, simply by existing. The twist here is the overt misogyny, and the weaponry (more on that later).

But are they scary? What they represent is. The psychotic youth of a nation that facilitates gun access to said youth (?!). Not terribly original, but always topical. And as for Stephanie in particular, pretending to be a Final Girl, downright diabolical.

The Terrible Place

Out there in the world it’s a nonstop murder party, and if I make the slightest mistake I’ll wind up dead.

As much as I love when a Final Girl must Return to the Terrible Place, this one fell short by sending Lynette to a different Final Girl’s Terrible Place. The lack of connection between Lynette and the site of the climax made it feel a little anticlimactic to me. Perhaps if we had spent more time there, ending up there would have felt more significant. But ultimately, it felt like a location of convenience… just somewhere to have a big final showdown.

Weapons/Shock Value

I’m every girl who’s ever run from a man with a weapon

Weapons are a key element of a slasher, because they do the literal slashing. They tend to be the kind of weapons that require the killer to get close to their victims, ripping them to pieces. They also tend to be phallic symbols (butcher knives, chainsaws, etc). Thus, there’s not much room for guns in the slasher; despite being phallic in shape, they don’t penetrate flesh, nor do they enable close contact attacks–which is exactly the point the killers in this book want to make.

Automatic weapons, they claim, are the more practical approach to mass killing. This stance puts this Slasher duo more on par with school shooters (angry, personal, and impersonal, all at once), than with the Jasons, Freddys, and Michaels of the slasher-verse.

It’s an unexpected twist, but is also a little disappointing, given that it removes the genre element of stalk & shock, giving the book more of an action/thriller feel.

The Victims

We’re the women who kept fighting back no matter how much it hurt, who jumped out that third-story window, who dragged ourselves up onto that roof when our bodies were screaming for us to roll over and die. Once we start something, it’s hard for us to stop.

Hunting down Final Girls, decades after they’ve survived their own massacres, is particularly cruel… and a really intriguing premise. You also don’t find a lot of middle-aged women at the centre of horror or action/thrillers, which makes this one stand out. That said, in doing the math on some of their ages, it became apparent that they were younger than they seemed (40s). A lot of the descriptive language focuses on them being “old,” “soft,” and “leathery.” I didn’t love that. I also didn’t love the way they bickered amongst eachother. Still, I can appreciate a story about a group of women, bonded by trauma, and how that can complicate their relationship.

Speaking of trauma, I really enjoyed the fact that each woman’s story was clearly based on a classic slasher (Halloween, Scream, etc), but in the world of the book, it was their real-life massacres that got turned into Hollywood shlock, making it even harder for them to move on. I thought this was an interesting comment and twist on the Art Imitates Life concept.

There was some diversity among the Final Girls, but unfortunately, the only black character was the first to die, and is in fact dead before we even get the chance to meet her. From what we learn of her afterwards, she sounds like she really was the best of them, and it’s really a shame that we didn’t get to spend any time with her.

Instead, our main character–our main Final Girl–is Lynette. And Lynette is, to be frank, a mess.

The Final Girl

We’re final girls; taking care of ourselves is what we do.

While we have several Final Girls in the cast, Lynette is our main character, and the Final Girl of the book (even though others survive).

The book opens with her morning workout routine a-la-Sarah Connor (T2), immediately telling us to expect more action than horror, and signaling to us that Lynette is a badass. But it quickly becomes apparent that Lynette is actually more fright than fight, and tbh, I found it challenging to be in her head, hanging out with every little paranoid thought. It was more than exhausting. At times, it was downright annoying.

Still, Lynette had impressive character growth and a heroic redemption story arc. 👏🏽

Final Thoughts

This one breaks down genre barriers as the perfect action story for slasher fans. Although the beginning feels somewhat bogged down by Lynette’s paranoia, things really pick up after the first third and we’re off to the races with a fast-paced thrill ride with many twists. But fair warning, despite its title, don’t expect to spend much time in the support group itself.

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Read this one? Share your thoughts in the comments!

And for more bloody good fun, join my Final Girl Bookclub on Fable and read along with me. See you in the threads!