The Final Girl Support Group

For years, Lynnette Tarkington has done everything to keep a low profile, not to be found and to be absolutely secure in her apartment which is equipped according to her needs: security cameras outside, several locks, a cage to hinder any intruder from getting close to her. She has a reason to be careful, she is a final girl, the only person surviving a massacre. She is not alone, there are more girls who share this fate and for more than a decade, they have been meeting regularly in a self-help group led by Dr Carol. But now, somebody seems to try to finish what hadn’t been completed before: killing the final girls. After the first of them has died and Lynnette is attacked in her apartment, she is sure: all the others are in danger and she needs to warn them. Yet, one question remains: who is the killer? Grady Hendrix’ novel is a roller coaster ride though a kind of teenage horror and splatter movie, just like the ones that were highly popular during the 1990s. Lynnette, the first person narrator, does not seem to be totally reliable, quite obviously, the events she had to go through did leave some scars, not only on the outside, but much more importantly on her psyche. She is a bit strange, to put it nicely, or crazy when judging her behaviour from the outside. Yet, she could be right, somebody might try to kill them, but maybe this also only happens in her head. As a reader, it takes some time to decide which perspective to take. I absolutely enjoyed the novel, it is just like the movies, fast paced, a bit over the top, some quite scary moments which make it highly entertaining. However, it is not only a shallow novel, there some depths when it comes to what such an experience does to a victim and also how people react to a single survivor who becomes a popular figure due to such an horrendous cruelty. There are some cruel horror scenes with a lot of violence, so the novel surely isn’t for everybody, me, personally, I had great fun reading it.