#14. A Final Girls Book Showdown
Listen, I love drama and I love books, and I especially love book drama.
Some background, for the unaware: Riley Sager published his book, “Final Girls,” back in 2017. I hadn’t read it yet, but I knew of it, so I will admit that I had a kind of surprised, “huh, sounds familiar”-reaction when Grady Hendrix’s new book, “The Final Girls Support Group,” was announced last year or so. Reading the blurbs of both books, they do sound somewhat similar. Both lean heavily on the “final girl” trope—ie, the main characters are women who are the lone survivors of brutal massacres—and the idea that now, someone is out to finish them off.
Now, I like Riley Sager just fine (sue me), but I am a diehard Grady Hendrix stan. I pre-orderd the new book and didn’t really give a second thought to Sager’s book, until….
Riley posted an incredibly shady tweet on the pub-day of “Final Girls Support Group.” This tweet was…not subtle, haha. Riley was clearly feeling a little salty, and I guess I can understand where he’s coming from—like I said, I picked up on the similarity too—especially because Grady’s books tend to be instantly buzzy, whereas Riley’s are…less so.
Now, to be clear, Grady Hendrix has gone on record more than once saying that his Final Girls book has been written for years (since around 2014). He’s stated that he wanted it to be published after “My Best Friend’s Exorcism,” but that he pitched it to his editor right as Riley Sager’s “Final Girls” was announced to market. Bad timing—but according to Grady, his manuscript was already written before he knew about Sager’s book. The similarity in title and concept, according to this timeline, would be nothing more than coincidence. I’m saying this outright not because I believe that Grady would ever steal an idea, but because Riley’s tweet seems to imply that he did.
Riley did walk it back with an apology tweet later the same day:
But at this point, I’m invested. I immediately decide that I need to read both of the Final Girls books to compare them. (If I were going to be a conspiracy-minded person, I’d suggest that perhaps generating interest in his own book was the driving force behind Riley’s tweet all along.) (I don’t really believe that though; I think Riley was just being a crybaby).
So, here we go. My thoughts on both of these:
The Final Girls Support Group, by Grady Hendrix
Plot: Have you ever wondered what happens after the end of a horror movie? What happens to that lone, bloody survivor (the Final Girl) after all her friends are dead? Sure, she made it out alive, but what comes next?
In this book, such survivors join The Final Girls Support Group—a literal support group for survivors of massacres. Facilitated by Dr. Carol Elliot, the support has been on-going for over a decade, with the aim of helping 6 women talk through their feelings about having avoided getting hacked to pieces. The ladies all cope with their past horrors in different ways—from turning to drugs/alcohol to philanthropy to straight up paranoia (as in the case of our main character, Lynette). Lynette has spent the years since her ordeal in a state of hyper-vigilance, always preparing for the moment when horror may strike again.
Lynette basically only leaves her home (ie: fortress) to attend Group, where she and her fellow Final Girls are working on piecing their lives together bit by bit. Until the day that of the women (Adrienne) misses Group, and a news bulletin alerts them to the fact that she’s been found murdered. Lynette’s worst fears are being realized: someone is trying to finish off the Final Girls, and they need to do whatever they can to surivive—again.
Thoughts: Listen, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—Grady can do no wrong in my book. I thought that the concept for this book was really clever. I think that fans of the horror/slasher movie genre will find this book particularly endearing—it’s written very much as a love-letter to the genre.
All of the characters in the book are based on the Final Girls from popular slasher films. Adrienne represents Friday the 13th; Marilyn represents Texas Chainsaw Massacre; Dani represents Halloween; Heather represents Nightmare on Elm Street; Julia represents Scream; and Lynette represents Silent Night, Deadly Night. The murders that they survived mirror the murders from those movies, and there are details sprinkled throughout the book which are clearly there fore the Fans. As someone who really likes these classic slasher films, I super enjoyed the minor details and the way Grady played with plots/characters in a whole new way.
Of the characters, I especially liked Lynette—I liked that she is so obviously flawed, and I appreciated the portrayal of her complicated relationships with the other women in the support group. While Lynette’s reaction to her past is the most extreme (never leaving the house, having no relationships, circuitous routes home from Group to avoid anyone following her, etc), I think it’s also the most like what you’d expect a person to do after going through a murderous ordeal, even if it is somewhat unrealistic in a practical sense. I should say as well that I really like how Grady always manages to write his female characters as being strong as well as vulnerable and flawed, and I like that while he draws in some details from classic slasher/horror movies, it is not in such a way that the female characters are reductive.
The only minor gripes I had were that it took me a while to keep the characters straight in my mind. I kept confusing them/forgetting who was who. This might just be a “me” problem, but I also think that there was just so much going on that it was hard to keep things straight. I found myself having to go back a lot to double check details because I kept losing them. I also kind of wished for a bit more detail about the secondary characters—we got a lot, but they still felt a little underdeveloped to me. There were a lot of them so this is probably a big ask, I admit. I was especially interested in Heather, but we knew the least about her.
I would also say that despite being marketed as “horror” this is more of a thriller for sure. It is not really scary at all, and I don’t think it’s really meant to be? I also don’t honestly know if anyone who is indifferent to slasher movies will really care about this book because in some ways it does rely a lot on prerequisite knowledge of the ~genre~—but I guess those folks aren’t the intended audience!
Overall though I really liked this!
For my fellow Hendrix fans: My Best Friend’s Exorcism remains my favorite, but I think Final Girls Support Group prob ties with Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires for second place. Horrorstor was def my least fave of Hendrix’s oeuvre, but that doesnt mean it was bad—still worth the read imo. (I’ve not yet read We Sold Our Souls so cannot rate that one!)
Final Girls, by Riley Sager
Plot: Some years ago, Quincy Carpenter went on a trip to a cabin in the woods (Pine Cottage) with her best friends + boyfriend. That night turned deadly, and Quincy was the lone survivor. This made her an unwilling member of a group dubbed by the media as Final Girls—the other two members of this ‘group’ being Lisa, who survived an attack on her sorority, and Sam, who fought off a killer during her shift working at the Nightlight Inn. Though the three girls have never met in person, they know of each other, and Lisa had reached out to Quincy to offer her support in the years after the Pine Cottage murders.
In present-day, Quincy is doing well for herself. She writes a popular baking blog, lives in a swanky New York City apartment, has a loving boyfriend, and also has the undying support of Coop (the officer who saved her life in the woods that night). She doesn’t have any memory of the events at Pine Cottage—her mind, thankfully, has blacked out the incident.
Quincy is living her life as normally as possible and has put the events of Pine Cottage behind her—until the day that Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her apartment. Shortly thereafter, Sam (the other Final Girl) turns up in New York—to ‘see how Quincy is doing’ following Lisa’s death, she claims. However, Sam seems hellbent on getting Quincy to remember the events of that fateful night, for reasons Quincy doesn’t understand (until later). What follows is a whirlwind story as Quincy tries to sort out the suspicious details of Lisa’s death, and what really brought Sam to her doorstep out of the blue. Is someone out to get the remaining Final Girls?
Thoughts: Okay, I’m not gonna lie—I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it the way I always enjoy Sager’s books. They’re quick to read and they’re generally pretty fun. I devour them the way I might devour a lifetime movie or a bag of potato chips. Is it high quality? Not really. Is it addictive? Absolutely!
I finished this VERY quickly, and found it genuinely hard to put down. I will give Sager credit where credit is due: I never see the endings/plot twists coming. I always think I know what’s going to happen/who is the Bad Guy, but I’m always wrong, right up to the end. As someone who is pretty good at guessing this sort of thing while reading spooky/suspenseful books, it’s always refreshing to be genuinely surprised by a plot twist.
In this particular book, I think that Sager did a pretty good job at making me suspicious of everyone at some point or another. So, kudos to him on that.
That all said, I kinda hated who the “Bad Guy” ended up being because it just seemed…like, blah. Boring. There were loads of red herrings throughout the whole book—which was good! Loved that! But then the actual ending was a little bit of a letdown and felt a bit like a sort of out-of-left-field attempt to be shocking.
I also didn’t enjoy how Sager kind of leaned a little heavily into certain slasher tropes in a way that was annoying to me? Like, the madonna-whore complex thing, where a female character is idealized until they have SEX (gasp), at which point they’re considered murderable, I guess? Also the whole “Best Friend” betrayal (where bff turns out to be a big yucky SLUT, unlike our heroine, the pure virginal non-drinking non-drug using survivor) was eye-rolly.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of 90s slasher/horror and I see what Sager was trying to do: set up his book like that. He succeeded. To be fair, I realize that these tropes are not of Sagers invention—and that in a book meant to mirror a “final girl” scenario out of a slasher movie, it makes sense that these things exist. I guess the difference for me is that whereas Hendrix uses humor to poke fun at the genre in his book, Sager leans all the way into it in a serious way—no humor at all— and I’m like…mmm, perhaps no.
Other quibbles: I felt like there was a lot of repetition of certain things for…no reason almost? Like, if I read the whole “Xanax and Grape-Soda” bit one more time, I was gonna fling my book across the room. The whole “Central Park” story-line was weird and didn’t really serve the plot in my opion. It also…didn’t make a lot of sense. For instance: if Quincy had been a suspect in a MULTIPLE MURDER INVESTIGATION—even if she was cleared—why wouldn’t they look into her harder after the park-debacle? Seems like an oversight, but giving the benefit of a doubt and assuming her record is clear or whatever…we still have a witness stating that they saw the suspect that night washing blood off their hands in the park. We also know that Quincy has injured her hand. And yet the cops never think to check Quincy’s hand for injuries? ummmmm??? This whole part of the story just seemed really sloppy to me.
Last minor gripe: repressed memory plot-line needs to be outlawed. Enough! It’s lazy!
I realize it seems like I am picking this apart (I guess I am)—but again, I didn’t hate this. I genuinely enjoyed reading this book. It reminds me of the 90s slashers that I love (and love to hate). I feel like the more I think about this one though, the more things I’ll find to hate, so I’m gonna leave it here.
Final thoughts on these:
It’s hard to really even compare these because they are written in such a different way, though I guess I can see how they might appeal to similar audiences (me).
I would recommend Hendrix’s book to anyone who is a big nerd about horror movies and appreciates a book which has both thriller and comedic vibes. I think that Hendrix’s writing is smart and compelling, and I appreciate his portrayal of his female characters very much.
I would recommend Sager’s book to anyone who wants a kinda campy book that reminds them of a kinda campy horror movie. It has some issues, but its a fast and fun read and scratches the itch for dark, murdery content.
To conclude: Apart from the title and the premise of using “final girls” as a plot device, these books don’t have very much in common. Basically, Sager tweeted a passive aggressive petty complaint and showed his whole ass for no damn reason (I would bet money that he didn’t even read Grady’s book prior to that dumbass tweet lmao)—but he did get me to read his book, so good for him or whatever.
-Amy