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My rating: 3 of 5 stars (3.5 rounded down to a 3)
The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix is a fun read, but it got a wee bit repetitive for me and I figured out the “twist” miles ahead of time. The eBook version is 352 pages. I listened to the audiobook, which clocks in at 14 hours and is narrated wonderfully by Adrienne King (who is the actress who played Alice Hardy in Friday the 13th Parts 1 and 2. I feel like I would have liked this book less if I read it with my eyes, because King does such a phenomenal job.
This book is written in the first person point of view from Lynnete Tarkington’s perspective. She is a real-life final girl, routinely meeting weekly with other final girls in a support group for the past decade. But one of the women misses a meeting, and it turns out she had been murdered. And Lynette starts to believe that someone is coming after the final girls, picking them off one by one. As a final girl, she can’t give up on her friends, so she plans to save as many of them as possible from this perceived threat.
If you are a fan of slasher films, this book felt like the author’s love letter to the genre. The characters didn’t have much depth, which didn’t make me really like any of them. I feel like this would have worked better as a move than as a book, like I thought with The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones. I also feel like this book could have been a wee bit shorter to tighten up the plot a bit. It sounds like a series adaptation is being developed at HBO Max right now, which could be fun to watch.
CW: descriptions of graphic violence (think: slasher films), gaslighting, other abuse
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