"The Final Girl Support Group" by Grady Hendrix

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. ~taken from Goodreads

Remember that time when someone suggested that the movie version was so much better than the book? Yeah, me neither, but here we are and I will say it: The movie version of this book would 100% be better. 

Let's start by taking about the plot as laid out to us in the premise. It is completely original and made me think "Why has no one done this before? It's genius!" and it really was! I was emailed by a publicist from Penguin Random House asking if I would read and review this soon-to-be-released horror novel and I said yes! 

I highly enjoyed the characters and how they gave nod to slasher movies of the past. Author, Grady Hendrix, takes the names of the the cinematic scream queens and uses them as main characters in this novel. I was confused at first, and had to look up a couple names/movies to make sure I was remembering correctly, but it's very clever how it was all done. 

The chapter titles were also a fun nod to the slasher film theme. Chapter titles such as "The New Blood", "Season of the Final Girls" and "Resurrection" were clever and made me smile. I really like how the slasher theme was carried out through the entire novel. 

Without giving anything away I will say that this was a fun read and it was what I expected. This book is being marketed as horror, but I am not sure that's an accurate genre listing. It has nostalgia, thriller, slasher, suspense and horror all mixed together. At times it was completely predictable, eye-rolling, and over the top, but that's the way slasher movies are, so it fit with that theme perfectly.

Overall I give this book 3 stars. The execution of the plot was done as best as it could be, but like I said from the start, this would have been a much better movie. The characters' names were a blur by the end and some scenes seemed to go on forever in gory, gruesome detail. There were a couple twists that kept me on my toes and wanting more and the ending was expected, but entertaining. 

Thanks to Netgalley, Berkley Publishing Group, Penguin Random House and author Grady Hendrix for allowing me a digital copy to read and give my honest review. 

"Final Girl Support Group" is set to be released here in the U.S. on July 13, 2021 so preorder now! 

Happy Reading!