The only reason why I gave this 4 stars is because that ending just had me going really at the end. Everything up until then was almost frantic and insane (in a good way) and I went really and went to sleep. I woke up this morning hoping to feel a bit differently, but nah.
“The Final Girl Support Group” follows Lynnette Tarkington who is dealing with being the sole survivor of her family’s massacre over 20 years ago. Lynnette meets once a month at a special support group that is for so-called “final girls” who not only have been the last survivor, but also had their stories twisted into movies/books that we all see today. We have six women who are our final girls: Adrienne was a camp counselor who survived a killer who claimed that he was seeking revenge for the death of his son at the camp (Friday the 13th series). Marilyn was attacked by cannibals (Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Dani’s brother Nick escaped from a mental asylum and on Halloween, killed people who tried to prevent him from getting at her (Halloween). Julia was left a final girl after her boyfriend and one of his friends decided to turn her into a final girl (Scream). Heather had to face a so-called Dream Killer (Nightmare on Elm Street). The group though has gotten toxic as of late and one of the members suggests disbanding it. Things come to a halt though when the news reports that Adrienne was found murdered that morning. This has Lynette running for the safety of her apartment and her plant, Fine. When Lynette’s sanctuary gets found out though, she starts running and thinks that someone out there is hunting the final girls for their own reasons.
So, I am just going to put this out here. You are going to end up not liking too many of the characters. I loved Dani and Julia. Heather made me want to smother her. I had a grudging admiration for Marilyn. And I wanted to whack Lynette upside the head…repeatedly. I think the reason why is this book shows you what happens to those final girls we have been following for all of these years. We all have one that we just absolutely think is the best and is our favorite. Mine has always been the character of Nancy in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. But of course we have the character here, Heather, who is a hot freaking mess and then Hendrix kind of leaves thing open to what exactly was going on with that whole thing. I did laugh though when one of the characters tells Lynette that she has the worst people instincts ever and I just nodded my head. She does. For a final girl, she makes some dumb decisions. But we also follow what happened to Lynette and why part of her doesn’t feel the same as the other so called “final girls.”
I did like what Hendrix did with these characters though. I know that some people felt frustrated because the whole thing felt a bit like a movie script, but to me it reads like a very good/weird slasher movie in book form. I mean some of the things that happened had me going okay, just roll with it. So you can see that Hendrix understands the genre and is doing a very nice homage with his own twists on things. And it really does help if you are familiar with the above movies so you can get how Hendrix changes things up.
The dialogue was really good. I laughed a lot. But I also appreciated that Hendrix included other media in this one. We get police interrogation excerpts, newspaper articles, chat rooms, etc. And you can read it as is, or my Kindle allowed me to hit a link that took me a the clear text version (much appreciated). So the book itself felt very interactive. I so wish that Hendrix had done a companion book that followed all of the final girls and the stories besides the bits we get here and there via Lynette and the additional text.
The flow was great too. This book moves so fast. I didn’t catch a lot of things the first time through and did go back later to read over some pieces.
The setting of the book takes place in California.
The ending though as I said, felt very unrealistic to me.
