A young woman stumbles out of the woods in a red dress, screaming loudly that someone is chasing her. A nearby police officer finds her and shoots the crazed killer, a psychopath who has escaped from a nearby mental hospital. Years later, Quincy is known as a ‘final girl’: the only survivor of a bloody massacre. There are other Final Girls and when one of them dies, another comes to find Quincy. Quincy, at first, is happy to have Sam with her: Sam knows what she’s feeling, what she’s going through. But soon, Quincy starts to notice that something is off with Sam’s behaviour, and Sam may not really be who she says that she is.
Let’s cut to the chase: this book is bullshit. Don’t do this to yourself. You’re a good person, you deserve nice things. Learn to crochet. Take a nice, long walk outside. Teach yourself pottery. Pick up padel. Meditate. LiveLaughLove. Don’t subject yourself to this apoplectic mess or garbled plot points and harebrained leaps of logic.
The ‘Final Girl’ is a familiar trope in slasher movies and Sager is obviously operating under the assumption that this trope isn’t either done to death or tongue in cheek. The obvious comparison here is Grady Hendrix’ Final Girls Support Club. I didn’t like that one either – the characters were all insufferable and it was far too long – but at least it understood the concepts of irony and parody. Sager, instead, just takes the concept and runs with it like it’s something that actually happens. Quincy’s red dress, for example, isn’t actually red: it was white, and the police don’t learn about this until she tells them. How, exactly, do you turn a white dress completely red other than by submerging it fully?
The most infuriating thing about the novel, though, is Quincy herself. I suppose she’s meant to be likable and relatable, but instead she’s annoying and deeply, deeply stupid.
There’s ‘stupid, but I could plausibly have made the same mistake’ and then there’s ‘defiantly stupid against all reason, logic and evidence’. Quincy’s the latter. Sam shows up and she immediately assumes that a) this is actually Sam despite never having met, and b) Because they both went through roughly the same thing at a different time and place, they are SOULMATES. When people try to point out to her that maybe it’s not the best idea in the world to invite a person you have never met into your house, Quincy doesn’t want to hear it (because SOULMATES) and somehow, they all let her, possibly hoping she’ll accidentally get herself killed. I know I did.
Even when Sam makes Quincy do things that she knows are wrong and doesn’t want to do, when she lies and steals, Quincy shrugs it off. She’s beyond naive: she’s downright delusional. And of course, there’s various instances of this-person-is-not-who-they-say-they-are. “Sam’s not who she says she is” is apparently meant to be a huge plot twist but it’s hard not to see that coming. The novel’s second half comes off the rails even more, with a bunch of Scooby-Doo like villains yanking off their masks as they cackle “No, it was I all along!”. The plot also hinges on amnesia, a convenient and trite deus ex machina at the best of times. These are not the best of times.
Sager doesn’t exactly have a reputation as someone who writes in-depth books or focuses on character development. His plots are always out there. I didn’t hate Last Time I Lied, and Lock Every Door was okay for what it was. I don’t expect high art going into these books. I do expect a modicum of coherence, and that’s where this book has utterly let me down.
