Welcome Readers, and thanks for checking out my bloody corner of the internet!

Slashing Pages is a horror book blog focused on novels about Final Girls, which typically fall into two categories: Slashers and Thrillers.

The Final Girl is a staple of the Slasher, a gory, fast-paced, horror sub-genre that bled into North American movie theatres in the mid-1970s and was hemorrhaging into popular culture by the 1980s. From Black Christmas (1974) and Halloween (1978), all the way to Scream (1996) and beyond, the plot is always the same: a masked killer slashes to death a group of friends (usually teens/young adults) one by one, until being subdued or killed by the one surviving woman, AKA The Final Girl. While the Slasher is best known as a movie genre, it has an ever-increasing presence in novels, as well.

More recently, the Final Girl archetype has also become a subject of some Thriller novels, which tend to focus on Her life after the fact, usually centering around the appearance of new evidence or a new attack, forcing her to relive her trauma and survive a follow-up attack of some sort.

And, of course, she WILL survive. Because that’s what a Final Girl does.

So, why Final Girls?

We all know the Slashers well: Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy, too many Ghostfaces to name… the list goes on and on. They are often male, usually silent, and suspiciously supernatural in their ability to return again, and again, and again. They are infinite, eternal, and legendary.

But for every Slasher, there is a Final Girl. These women are fighters, survivors, and heroes. I want to celebrate them. It’s that simple.

And while, historically, the Final Girl has been a straight, cis, white, young woman, these days many authors are beginning to expand and diversify this role through their novels, giving us a much broader range of Final Girls to celebrate.

I invite you to celebrate these women along with me. It should be a bloody good time 🩸

And for more bloody good fun…

Join my Final Girl Bookclub on Fable to read along with me. Fable is entirely virtual, with all chatter taking place in chapter-by-chapter discussion threads. I hope to see you there!