To quote Randy, our ‘Curator of Horror’ at SFFWorld, “This is another novel that alludes to horror without exactly being a horror novel. ”
A cautionary contemporary story for this year’s Countdown.
I want to help you, Quincy, [Lisa] told me. I want to teach you how to be a Final Girl.
What if I don’t want to be a Final Girl?
That’s not your choice. It’s already been decided for you. You can’t change what’s happened. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.
— from Final Girls
Xanax. A glass of wine and sometimes another and sometimes the intervals shrink between another and another. Kitchen cleaned. Counter prepped. Dishes, bowls, trays and utensils on the counter in proper order, ingredients sorted and arrayed …
What happens after the credits roll in a slasher film? How is the trauma contended with, contained and some semblance of normality resumed? Is it ever? What does it feel like for the media to dub you “Final Girl,” the term applied by slasher film critics and fans to the last woman standing, the one who saw the killing or at least the results of the killing, who somehow avoided paralysis or hysteria and survived the slaughter?
Lisa Milner became a victim’s advocate, a sort of mother figure for troubled young women.
Samantha Boyd disappeared.
Quincy Carpenter took the money from law suits, rented an apartment in New York City and started a baking podcast. Quincy has created a content life with her fiancé, Jeff, and relies on the cop, Coop, who saved her, as her guardian angel, while the orderliness of following a recipe, the satisfaction of making something with her own hands, and of course the Xanax and the wine, soothe her, allay her fears. And yet there are occasional flashes of memory, and sometimes disturbing dreams. Quincy can’t remember all of what happened, one of the main conflicts in the novel is between not wanting to recall the details and needing to remember everything: There’s the arrival at the cabin, the walk in the woods, the meeting with a stranger, a few moments with her friends she’s ashamed of, and the moment her roommate, Janelle, stumbles out of the trees, bloody and dying and then the moment Quincy’s staggering through the woods and spots a cop and runs to him. Between, nothing.
Final Girls by Riley Sager neatly incorporates a slasher movie narrative into a more developed and satisfying mystery plot, exploring the repercussions of slasher film events that are rarely alluded to in slasher films, piecing together what happened to Quincy, which becomes crucial after she learns Lisa has committed suicide and Samantha Boyd (Sam) reappears, contacts her and becomes her confidant.
Except Lisa hasn’t committed suicide: Closer examination shows murder and now the remaining “final girls” have reasons to be suspicious of each other.
Over the course of the novel Quincy finds out some things about herself she didn’t know, also some things about Sam that are at least unsettling. Suspicion between the two simmers and catches fire and leads to some plot twists that are reasonable and logical given the premise. The reveal toward the end is not as surprising as some reviewers indicate, but it fits what we learned and makes sense within the context of the story and its characters.
While I wouldn’t put Final Girls in quite the same orbit as Gillian Flynn’s psychological thrillers, it has a smart, twisty premise, that being a survivor – a “Final Girl” – in real life doesn’t end with the credits, that being a survivor of such an event is a point in life but a point of such disruption and emotional turmoil that it deflects the course of that life, maybe toward self-destruction or maybe toward something else. Following Quincy and Sam to find out which makes for compelling reading.
FInal Girls by Riley Sager (Ebury Press, 2017)
352 pages
ISBN: 978-1785034022
Review by Randy Money, October 2018.
