The Final Girl Support Group

 “Ever wonder what happens to those final girls? After the cops eliminate them as suspects, after the press releases their brace-faced, pizza-cheeked, bad-hair-day class photos that inevitably get included on the cover of the true crime book?”

– Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group

🔪I received an e-ARC of this story from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a fair review. The Final Girl Support Group (2021) will release on 13th July!🔪

Grady Hendrix has carved out something of a niche over the years with his loving homages and deconstructions of genre tropes, and his latest offering, titled The Final Girl Support Group, is no different. As he did for religious horror and exorcisms in My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016) and vampires in The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (2020), in this outing Hendrix skewers the slasher sub-genre.

The core concept of the story is pretty intriguing, and an original one – so-called “final girls”, women who survived very real horror movie-esque encounters with very human “Monsters”, meet up in Alcoholics Anonymous-style support groups as a way of confronting and processing their experiences. These sessions are led by a doctor named Carol Elliot, and we follow Lynnette Tarkington, a woman who survived an encounter with a murderous Santa Claus one Christmas Eve, and his brother a while after. Each of the final girls have endured their own similar horror movie scenarios, and developed their own methods of coping – one starts a camp for fellow survivors, one turns to drugs and alcohol, and Lynette herself retreats into a half-life of intricate routines and self-isolation.

Personally, I did sometimes feel like the references were a little too on-the-nose for my liking – the backstories of each of the final girls are less “inspired by” popular slasher franchises than they are straight lifted from the source material, and I think I would have liked it better if Hendrix had devised his own slasher setups. From The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween through to Friday the 13th and Scream, these inspirations are transplanted more or less unchanged, with the exception of heroine and killer names.

Ironically, I think the one I wanted most to know more about was the story behind the Gnomecoming killings. I also thought that Heather’s monster and franchise, called The Dream King and Deadly Dreams respectively (both clearly a reference to the A Nightmare on Elm Street series and its killer, Freddy Krueger – again, a bit on-the-nose), introduced some interesting and seemingly supernatural elements, but sadly this was quite a small part of the overall narrative.

I’d read from a few other reviewers that they felt this story may have worked better as a movie than as a book and, at least to a certain degree, I’m inclined to agree – it does have a very filmic aspect to it. The plot is, for the most part, a whodunit thriller rather than a conventional horror or slasher story. When the news hits the support group that one of their number has been brutally murdered, protagonist Lynnette finds herself drawn into an elaborate scheme that appears to be intent on eliminating all of the remaining final girls one-by-one. The bulk of the narrative follows Lynnette as she attempts to put the pieces together whilst fighting to survive and fleeing the law, and so the actual support groups don’t play as much of a role as I’d been expecting.

That isn’t to say I disliked the story though, I felt it moved along at a brisk pace and was highly compelling – I was eager to find out where the plot was headed and who exactly was pulling the strings, if indeed anyone was. That was another element I thoroughly enjoyed: throughout the story, it’s made clear that our hero Lynette has been drastically affected by her own experiences and as such, often comes across as an unreliable narrator. There is a lingering feeling throughout the narrative that maybe there is no great conspiracy, and that the notion of such a scheme is just a result of Lynette’s extreme trauma.

I felt there were plenty of believable red herrings sprinkled throughout which kept things unpredictable, and a constant sense of danger made for a tense read. There is also a strong undercurrent of social commentary as Grady examines the philosophy behind the destruction of the (typically male) monster and the creation represented by the (typically pure, virginal and female) survivor. He explores how such horrific events affect the survivors, how those traumas manifest themselves in later life, and how one never truly gets over something so senseless and brutal. Although the slasher sub-genre takes this to the nth degree, the unavoidable fallout on survivors of violent events is all too real, and the author presents this well.

It’s evident Hendrix truly loves the genre, flaws, warts and all. Beyond the more obvious references of the slasher backstories, there are tons of throwbacks through character names, chapter headings and certain scenes too, and the author’s passion for horror shines through. I think it’s well worth reading for that alone, Grady Hendrix knows his stuff – though you’d already know that if you are at all familiar with his Paperbacks From Hell (2017) non-fiction work – and this really rubs off on his own horror fiction.

VERDICT: Though The Final Girl Support Group is never quite on par with his earlier works, this is still a very good read. The plot is engaging, and although some elements were a little underdeveloped in my opinion, it was a thrilling ride from the first page to the last. It’s easy to see why Hendrix has become a popular mainstay in the genre, and even among readers that don’t usually delve into horror – his writing is accessible, endlessly entertaining, and written with a real fire and understanding of the genre.

It’s a strong ⭐⭐⭐⭐/⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ from this reviewer. I also want to say a humongous thank you to both the author Grady Hendrix, publisher Titan Books, and to NetGalley, for providing the ARC and giving me the chance to read and review it early.