The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

I enjoy a good classic horror movie. I secretly blame my father for my love of scary movies, but I also love him for introducing me to such an interesting genre of movies. I didn’t love them as a child because I was way too terrified. Though in the last few years, I’ve gone back and watched the movies that terrified me in my youth. But after watching them this time around, I realized they were actually not that scary. I watched Friday the 13th and laughed. I watched Scream and I was so entertained, I had to watch the sequels. So when I read the premise for this book, I knew this was right up my alley. Final girls from tropes taken from classic horror films? Sign me up baby!

In a horror movie, the final girl is the one left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and got revenge for all her fallen friends. But after the sirens fade and the movie audience clears out, what happens to her? Lynnette Tarkington is a real life final girl who survived a home massacre twenty two years ago and it has defined her ever since. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group. They’ve been working on healing and trying to put their lives back together. But when one of the women misses a meeting, Lynnette’s worst fears become true. Someone knows about them and wants to destroy them, piece by piece. But don’t underestimate these final girls. No matter how badly the odds are stacked against them, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

The Final Girl Support Group was one wild ride. It starts out with us learning about Lynnette and her PTSD. How she is always looking over her shoulder, highly paranoid, and extremely depressed. I could feel the pain just radiating off of Lynnette. When she finally makes it to her support group, we meet the different women. Heather, who is part of the support group, is the final girl from a story just like A Nightmare on Elm Street. Marilyn, another from the group, has a story just like the final girl in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Scream, Friday the 13th, and other stories are also present in other final girl’s stories. It was entertaining to read and see these insane stories come alive as someone’s backstory.

My favorite part of the whole novel was seeing how past traumas affect people’s lives. The final girls grew into women with serious PTSD, anxiety, depression, isolation, addiction, and much more. While this is just a fiction novel, it brought up some very true points. How murders, tragedies, and more can be exploited for momentary news. How we can forget there are actual victims, families, and more left to deal with the tragedies once the cameras have gone. I also loved seeing how each women dealt with their past. Some chose to move beyond it, some dwelled, some voweled to make sure no one else dealt with the pain they did.

Now on to a few hiccups I had when it came to this book. Lynnette was my least favorite character in the whole novel! She’s was a hot mess express and I have a feeling she would’ve been that way even without her past trauma. I enjoyed all the other women in the support group better than her! I love a unreliable narrator but Lynnette was just…insufferable. At one point, she left her friend to die?! Like ma’am?! Have a heart! The book also included newspaper clippings, web journals, emails, and more in certain parts of the book. They were meant to add to the story and show different versions of how people saw the final girls. I did not enjoy these little additions whatsoever. They were distracting and didn’t add anything to the story to me. Anything I learned from the novel about the characters wasn’t from those additional clippings.

I enjoyed this novel and it kicked off my spooky season reads! Very few times have I thought a book would make for a better movie but with this I did. It was a wild ride but I think it would be a fun movie. I would rate this 3.5 out of 5 stars. If you want a novel that’s fun but you need to suspend your disbelief for a little, this one’s for you!