Grady Hendrix has a fine-tuned author’s pen combining horrific elements and familiar elements. Whether it is demon possession and 1980s pop culture, the crossroads of horror and heavy metal, or suburban vampires, his novels are smart and precise. His latest novel, The Final Girl Support Group, tackles one of the most popular horror tropes, the slasher film, and is also a publisher jump for him. My full review after the jacket copy.
In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives…but what happens after?
Like his bestselling novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix’s latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films—movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.
Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.
But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.
In Grady’s novel, the girls who survived and confronted the slashers, killers in the mold of Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees (and his mother), and Leatherface, live in the same world. In the world of The Final Girls Support Group, the movies we all know and love are based on real events. Granted, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre did claim to be based on real events. Another example, Heather, the girl who survived an encounter with the Dream King co-exists with Lynette, who survived the killer dressed like Santa Claus who murdered her entire family. (The Dream King obviously Freddy Kreuger, and the first name of the actress who played Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street is Heather). These two women, along with four other women survivors of mass killings that resonate with some other franchises, meet regularly with Dr. Carol to help each other deal with their post-trauma issues. The novel is told through the voice of Lynette Tarkington, who maybe needs the group more than the other members. We catch up with these final girls during a very contentious session, only for them to learn something bad has happened to the one Final Girl who wasn’t in attendance.
That isn’t too much of a spoiler because the above “absence” occurs within the first 20 pages of the novel. From that point forward, Lynnette takes us on a wild chase as she suspects and then is convinced a killer is trying to take out the members of the Final Girl Support Group. As Lynnette tries to convince each of her “sisters” that they are being targeted, we learn a little bit about each of the Final Girls; their traumatic event, how they survived, and what they’ve been doing since their event. Readers familiar with slasher movies, particularly those from the 1980s and 1990s that spawned large franchises, will find resonance between these women and many of the popular movies. While the homage Hendrix is aiming for is a quite blatant and intentional filing off of the serial numbers, that’s only part of the enjoyment of the novel. He does a fantastic job of lending each of these women heaps of empathy, especially Lynnette. Because of her situation and “origin story,” which is the last to be revealed, we only know of her in the moment after she’s experienced her trauma, and I found it very difficult not to feel for her and believe her. That said, as the novel races towards the breakneck conclusion, doubt certainly enters the fold and I began to wonder if she was an unreliable narrator given how events unfold around her. However, one of the themes of the novel eventually became clear: believe women, believe the victims.
One other fun thing about this, which is true of almost every book Grady Hendrix has written, are the chapter titles. I would dare to say that Grady Hendrix has elevated naming the clever chapter title into an art form. The design of the book is a lot of fun, too. It very much looks like it could be on the shelf of a video rental store in the 80s or 90s. The nice, final touch is that the font on the cover and for the chapter titles is the same font used in John Carpenter’s Halloween, a film many have credited as the first modern slasher film.
I’m a big horror fan, but the slasher sub-genre was never my go-to subset of the genre. It isn’t that I dislike it, I just prefer some of the other flavors of horror. Of course, I’m familiar with a couple of the big ones like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and one of my overall favorite horror movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, so some of the character stand-ins/homages didn’t land with me 100% since I’m not super well-versed in Slasher films. Again, that isn’t necessarily the point nor are those connections required to be made to completely enjoy the novel, more like a dash of whip cream on a delicious scoop of ice cream. In fact, Dr. Carol Elliott is likely an homage to Professor Carol J. Clover, who coined the term “Final Girl” and theory in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. All of that said, The Final Girl Support Group was an enormously fun, extremely smart, thrill ride of a novel. It is a novel that both entertains and Makes a Statement, which in my mind, is what great literature should do. I continue to say this when I write about Grady Hendrix’s work, but with each novel or thing (non-fiction like Paperbacks from Hell or films he’s written) he produces in the genre, he’s cementing himself as a foundational voice in early 21st Century Horror. His novels have become appointment reading for me at this point.
The Final Girl Support Group is another must-read novel and will land comfortably on my top reads of 2021.
Highly Recommended.
© 2021 Rob H. Bedford
Berkeley Books | July 2021
Hardcover | 352 pages
Landing Page for the book: https://www.gradyhendrix.com/the-final-girl-support-group/
Author Web site: https://www.gradyhendrix.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
