![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In the world of this book, slasher movie franchises are based on actual, real-world incidents. The sole female survivors of bizarre mass murders get movies made about them, and attend a special "final girls" support group. Hendrix uses very thinly veiled versions of our-world slasher franchises, so Texas Chainsaw Massacre becomes Panhandle Meathook (my favorite variant), Scream becomes Stab, Freddy Kreuger becomes the Dream King, and so forth.
The women have been in the support group for fifteen years, but it's beginning to break up when one of them is murdered. The narrator, Lynnette Tarkington (survivor of two Christmas-themed massacres), is convinced that a killer is stalking them all.
I regret to say that despite an excellent action climax, this book was a disappointment and my least-favorite book by Hendrix.
(My ranking of his books, now that I've read them all:
Tied for # 1 - I loved all three but they're so different and have such different goals that I can't rank them against each other: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, We Sold Our Souls, Paperbacks from Hell.
4. My Best Friend's Exorcism.
5. Horrorstor.
6. The Final Girl Support Group.)
Lynnette is basically paranoia and hypervigilance made into a character. Her narration is extremely repetitive and one-note. The rest of the women are barely sketched in and don't get much development. The support group is disintegrating and the women are all on the outs when the book starts, so we don't really see what their relationships were like when they were better.
To add to the frustration, we don't learn enough about the other survivors and what they survived to be able to see what's the same and what's a departure from the movies in our world. If you're going to be meta, go all-out and let us see whether or not the equivalent of Sydney from Scream is actually anything like Sydney, and if she too ended up stalked on the set of the movie that was made out of her life.
The meta aspect of slasher movies being based on real massacres was intriguing, but makes the point of the book very muddy. In our world slasher fans are not actually relishing the suffering of real people. They're fans of fiction. Norman Bates was loosely based on a real serial killer, but Marion Crane was not a real woman. In the world of Final Girls, she would have been a real woman who had been repeatedly stabbed and left for dead but survived, and Psycho would have come out just a few years after that happened. The tastefulness and social impact of movies like Scream may be debatable, but Sydney is not a real person whose real friends actually died.
The closest equivalent to the Final Girls slasher movies would be true crime, but that functions in a different way because it is in fact real. So the points made about sexism and so forth are in this weird limbo land where they're true in and of themselves, but they're directed at a target that doesn't actually exist in our world, and in our world is either more benign or a different thing entirely. For me it made a very potent metaphor - the final girl - no longer work as a metaphor.
Even more egregiously, we barely see the Final Girl support group! It's only in a few scenes, and there isn't a single scene with all six of the final girls together. Most of the book is Lynnette rushing about madly, alone or with other people or occasionally with one or two of the other women from the group, making bad decisions. Every single one of Hendrix's other books gets an A for leaning into the premise, but this one is more like a C.
The women have been in the support group for fifteen years, but it's beginning to break up when one of them is murdered. The narrator, Lynnette Tarkington (survivor of two Christmas-themed massacres), is convinced that a killer is stalking them all.
I regret to say that despite an excellent action climax, this book was a disappointment and my least-favorite book by Hendrix.
(My ranking of his books, now that I've read them all:
Tied for # 1 - I loved all three but they're so different and have such different goals that I can't rank them against each other: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, We Sold Our Souls, Paperbacks from Hell.
4. My Best Friend's Exorcism.
5. Horrorstor.
6. The Final Girl Support Group.)
Lynnette is basically paranoia and hypervigilance made into a character. Her narration is extremely repetitive and one-note. The rest of the women are barely sketched in and don't get much development. The support group is disintegrating and the women are all on the outs when the book starts, so we don't really see what their relationships were like when they were better.
To add to the frustration, we don't learn enough about the other survivors and what they survived to be able to see what's the same and what's a departure from the movies in our world. If you're going to be meta, go all-out and let us see whether or not the equivalent of Sydney from Scream is actually anything like Sydney, and if she too ended up stalked on the set of the movie that was made out of her life.
The meta aspect of slasher movies being based on real massacres was intriguing, but makes the point of the book very muddy. In our world slasher fans are not actually relishing the suffering of real people. They're fans of fiction. Norman Bates was loosely based on a real serial killer, but Marion Crane was not a real woman. In the world of Final Girls, she would have been a real woman who had been repeatedly stabbed and left for dead but survived, and Psycho would have come out just a few years after that happened. The tastefulness and social impact of movies like Scream may be debatable, but Sydney is not a real person whose real friends actually died.
The closest equivalent to the Final Girls slasher movies would be true crime, but that functions in a different way because it is in fact real. So the points made about sexism and so forth are in this weird limbo land where they're true in and of themselves, but they're directed at a target that doesn't actually exist in our world, and in our world is either more benign or a different thing entirely. For me it made a very potent metaphor - the final girl - no longer work as a metaphor.
Even more egregiously, we barely see the Final Girl support group! It's only in a few scenes, and there isn't a single scene with all six of the final girls together. Most of the book is Lynnette rushing about madly, alone or with other people or occasionally with one or two of the other women from the group, making bad decisions. Every single one of Hendrix's other books gets an A for leaning into the premise, but this one is more like a C.
