Prasetya Nababan

The Final Girl Support Group

Book by Grady Hendrix

DETAILS

Publisher : Berkley; Reprint edition (June 14, 2022) Language : English Paperback : 352 pages ISBN-10 : 0593201248 ISBN-13 : 978-0593201244 Item Weight : 9.6 ounces Dimensions : 5.43 x 0.72 x 8.18 inches Best Sellers Rank: #7,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #4 in Vampire Horror #312 in Psychological Thrillers (Books) #735 in Suspense Thrillers , THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER VOTED GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD BEST HORROR NOVEL OF 2021 A Good Morning America Buzz Pick “The horror master…puts his unique spin on slasher movie tropes.”- USA Today A can't-miss summer read, selected by The New York Times , Oprah Daily , Time, USA Today , The Philadelphia Inquirer , CNN, LitHub , BookRiot , Bustle, Popsugar and the New York Public Library 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. Read more

REVIEW

As the title no doubt suggests to any slasher fan, Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group is the tale of Final Girls – those women who survive a slasher film, who turn out to be able to overpower the killer, who have what it takes to survive. But what happens afterward – when the trauma sets in (to say nothing of the inevitable sequel)? And how do they fit in to a world that seems increasingly to have moved away from some of what brought about the slasher genre in the first place? Trust Grady Hendrix to do these questions right. I’ve read any number of meta-slasher books in recent years (Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw is a solid one; Riley Sager’s Final Girls was decent enough but pales in comparison to Chainsaw and Support Group), but Hendrix’s takes it all a step further, both in conceit (the base concept here is that the slasher franchises we know were all based on real events and crimes; while the franchises still evolved into absurdity, each of them – and the book gives us thinly disguised versions of all of the usual suspects, complete with a slew of easter eggs that will delight horror fans – arose from a true story and a victim who turned her story into a film) and in complexity. Hendrix peppers his book with interstitial notes that provide analysis of the genre, both by horror aficionados and feminist film critics, interrogating the ideas and concepts of the genre, all while simultaneously tapping into what made it so appealing in the first place – and how its changes (and decline) reflect societal changes as a whole. (There’s a midbook document discussing slashers in the age of school shootings that genuinely gave me pause and left me reeling a bit.) But if all of this sounds super heady and intellectual, it shouldn’t, because in the end, The Final Girl Support Group is, of course, a slasher of its own kind. Narrated by one of the members of the eponymous girl, one whose trauma has left her life a series of defense mechanisms and paranoid episodes, Hendrix stomps on the gas relatively early and never lets off, bringing his cast of final girls to life quickly and efficiently (and in doing so, giving us a nice range of trauma responses and personalities) but also throwing us into a nightmare as it feels like someone is once again revving things up for a new volume of slasher kills. What’s most notable about his story, though, is the way that it’s hard to pin down for so much of its running time; every time you think you have a sense of where the story is heading, Hendrix has a way of throwing a new wrinkle our way, changing the perpetrator, or the method, or the motive – and does it all by immersing us in the head of a narrator whose reactions leave her a most unreliable storyteller indeed. My only small grumble with Support Group is that the ending doesn’t feel as rich and as engaging as the rest of the book; Hendrix does such a great job of mixing subtext and text for the entire story that it’s a little disappointing that the finale isn’t a bit more memorable, and feels a little more of a letdown than I wish it did. But even then, it’s not enough to detract from the book too much; Support Group does what Riley Sager attempted to do in Final Girls but does it far better, embracing and questioning the genre, and finding a way to turn it into something really satisfying. Pair this with My Heart is a Chainsaw and you have a pair of slasher novels for the ages, really, and a treat for horror fans in general.

DOWNLOAD PAGE