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« Last post by The P on February 15, 2022, 02:30:58 pm »
The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix (5)
This one was my trade off for a friend reading TDTCB. It's a pretty quick read. The premise is there is this group of women who've all survived various slasher murder sprees as teens. Now they are older and have a therapy group. The whole book is narrated in present-tense by one of the group members. The back story of each final girl is mostly slowly dribbled in with "newspaper clippings" or articles at the beginning of each chapter. It kind of makes for a bit of a confusing start as there are sometimes a lot of names with no context until either the narrator or chapter breaks decide to expound on them. Pretty early on the narrator concludes someone is trying to kill them all, and the rest is her trying to convince people and figure out who is doing what.
It's mostly entertaining. It's a nice homage to the genre, and I especially got a lot of Scream sequel vibes in that all these women have either capitalized on or been exploited by their trauma by having movie or book deals. There is some gender commentary throughout, but it makes its point without belaboring it. There are some small surprises throughout, but by being a homage to familiar tropes, its beats are fairly predictable. It's still fun.
I wish it had leaned more into the unreliability of the narrator. She's relaying things as she sees them, and her perception is filtered by her past trauma. But for the most part she couches her analysis of events and lets us know she's unsure and maybe wrong. It makes for an easy read that you don't need to spend much thought on, but it would have been better to lean into her misperception.
He's got other books themed around other tropes of the horror genre. And I certainly won't mind reading them, especially if they are "trades" for my friend reading more Bakker.
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