The Final Girl Support Group, by Grady Hendrix

[rachelmanija]

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.

Comments

[pauraque]

Hmm. Just as you say, slasher films aren't true crime narratives, and asking "but what if they were?" doesn't strike me as a very good premise to start with, for all the reasons you mentioned and more. The concept actually reminds me unpleasantly of fandom purity discourse of the type that fails to distinguish between the suffering of fictional characters and the suffering of real people, and uses that conflation to attack the morality (and not just the taste) of writers and readers. I haven't read the book, and maybe Hendrix wasn't intending anything like that kind of message, but it's where my mind went.

[musesfool]

that's a shame, because a support group for Final Girls sounds like a great and meaty premise, but the rest is making me side-eye for the reasons you list.

[sholio]

Awww man, that's too bad! I have this book in Mt. TBR and now I'm thinking about just giving it a pass. (Maybe I'll read a little to see if it hooks me? IDK.)

In general, for some reason, it seems like this specific thing - taking a normal, harmless fandom activity, genre, trope, etc, and then lampshading it to the point where it becomes deeply creepy instead - is a weirdly common failure mode for fiction that tries to deal with fictional tropes metatextually. I'm thinking about things like Marvel and DC comics having characters write fanfic about superheroes in-universe, which makes it go from being a normal and innocuous thing that people do, to weird and creepy when they're doing it about real-life people that they know, but still acting like it's more or less the same thing.

[scioscribe]

I still might read this--I was so excited when it came out!--but I'm very glad to be going in forewarned and forearmed about a lot of weird, unfortunately shame-y implications that don't even do anything to really enhance the book or its themes. And it's such a great premise, too! Like you said, it's uncharacteristic for Hendrix to whiff on really delivering on that.

[sovay]

For me it made a very potent metaphor - the final girl - no longer work as a metaphor.

It sounds like the kind of premise that needed to exist in a much more metafictional space to function.

[sartorias]

Sounds like someone else ought to have taken the great idea and written a totally different book.

[calandrahunter]

"The rest of the women are barely sketched in and don't get much development."

:|

"with one or two of the other women from the group, making bad decisions"

:(

I think if you're gonna with the premise of 'what if slasher movies BUT REAL' then you should probably go for a crackier, less serious take on it, and it doesn't sound like it did that.

I'm guessing Lynnette is more the Laurie from Halloween, since the more recent Halloweens did a more paranoid, older Laurie? But Sydney in Scream also went hypervigilant and paranoid. They could've done a lot with the women being different ages (the Sydney being younger than the Laurie) and ways of coping (the Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street going all-in on studying dreams vs the Laurie's and Sydney's hypervigilant paranoia).

(Also, I can't help but wonder where Ash from Evil Dead is in all this! Is there a Final Guy support group? Has he run off to live in the woods like an idiot?)

If you're in the mood for a meta-take on the Final Girl, then there was a 2015 film The Final Girls, which is about the teenage daughter of a dead scream queen being pulled into the 1980s slasher flick that made her mother famous, and it has some wonderful mother-daughter moments.

ETA: Thinking about it further, I think a better take on it might've been 'what if one of the women gets clues about an upcoming massacre, and they work together to prevent it'? Because IDK, the whole 'oho, these women got menaced once, now they are menaced again!' is just... too much like the sequels of those slasher films.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ugh, this reminds me of the self-righteous indignation I've seen that the Hunger Games books are about how it's depraved for the Capitolites to enjoy watching children die, and yet Hollywood made a movie in which the arena scenes are enjoyable to watch and people enjoyed watching them!! *insert pearl-clutching*

Oh sorry, I must have missed the part where THE ACTORS DIED.