Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group is the page-turning slasher of the summer
The Horrorstör and My Best Friend’s Exorcism author delivers a breathless twist on slasher-movie conventions
Books Reviews Grady Hendrix
Throughout his supernatural thrillers, Grady Hendrix has demonstrated a remarkable facility for suspense. He writes page-turning action sequences that increase the momentum of his high-concept narratives. Whether it’s the nervy teenage face-offs of My Best Friend’s Exorcism or a race-against-time struggle with the undead in The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires, he excels at crafting passages where readers can lose themselves in the frenetic fun of just seeing what happens next. With his latest work, The Final Girl Support Group, he’s turned that talent into a nearly book-length workout, an exercise in go-go acceleration that steps on the gas soon after it begins and doesn’t stop until the final pages. It’s not the deepest, but it’s certainly his most exhilarating work yet.
The Final Girl Support Group draws its title from Carol J. Clover’s term, found in her book Men, Women, And Chainsaws, for the last one standing in many a horror movie—the “final girl” who survives to the end and defeats the killer, and usually serves as the audience stand-in. Hendrix, who clearly knows his way around the concept (to be expected from someone who’s written a history of ’70s and ’80s horror), peppers his new novel with excerpts from made-up research papers and fictionalized police transcripts involving final girls; in his story, these women not only exist in the real world but are also celebrities of a sort. The kinds of murder sprees that populate movies like Friday The 13th and Halloween actually happened in this version of America, and along the same timetable as their cinematic counterparts (think 1970s through the ’90s) before fading from the zeitgeist in the 21st century. The women who survived became household names for a time, their traumatic experiences fodder for tabloids pop culture.
From this universe comes protagonist Lynette Tarkington, whose experience with a deadly killer more than 20 years prior has left her paranoid and alone, her daily life a series of moves calculated to keep herself isolated and safe from any would-be threats. Her first-person account leads us to the titular therapy session: a monthly meeting of women who became final girls in the public eye, and who have coped with their psychological damage in very different ways. After dispensing with the basics (we get the briefest of sketches of the five other women, whose personalities only start to be filled out later in the book), it’s not long before Hendrix pulls the trigger on his plot: When one of the women misses a meeting, Lynette realizes someone is staging a well-coordinated attack on all of the survivors, trying to finish what their boogeymen failed to achieve the first time around. Hitting the road, Lynnette frantically tries to keep her sort-of friends safe, all the while struggling to expose the killer before it’s too late.
The wicked pleasure of Hendrix’s book comes from just how effectively he sets up the life-or-death stakes of Lynnette’s situation—and how clearly outmatched her and the other women seem to be. This means the tension and go-for-broke pacing never really let up, because even when Lynnette stops to get a much-needed night’s sleep or enters the heavily guarded home of a fellow survivor, the threat of an attack never fades. This is driven home in an early sequence when a hail of gunfire rips through the fortress that is Lynnette’s apartment, shattering her illusion of safety and upending the convention that killers require proximity in order to enact their death and destruction. Hendrix nicely conveys Lynnette’s panicky desperation and sense that she can’t trust anything or anyone she thought she knew, and he sustains urgency through a series of increasingly fraught sequences, en route to a showdown that both pays homage to the slashers that inspired this novel and offers a smart meta-twist.
That’s not to say everything about the novel works. Hendrix struggles in the early going to set the stage, with some clunky throat-clearing and telling, instead of showing, the themes of why we as a culture are fascinated by violence, and particularly violence against women. His attempts at tough talk can be dreadful; in his eyes, it seems, anytime women want to be rude and crude, they devolve into the puerile spewings of a middle-school locker room. (“I’ve dealt with some higher-level astral bullshit that would make you drop a log in your satin panties,” goes one unfortunate effort.) The oddest choice is basing all of the final girls’ experiences on well-known movies: One woman’s traumatic encounter is just a retelling of Halloween; another’s is a barely altered version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Given that The Final Girl Support Group acknowledges the existence of all sorts of real-life pop culture, it’s jarring to encounter the thinly veiled plots of Scream and Scream 2 (among others) repurposed for his characters’ backstories, especially when movies like Alien not only still exist in the world of the book, but are referenced by name throughout.
Still, once the action gets going, these missteps fall by the wayside and the fast-paced excitement takes center stage. Hendrix sets aside his usual supernatural trappings; everything that takes place is firmly in the realm of the all-too-human, monstrous homicidal tendencies and all. The Final Girl Support Group isn’t necessarily scary—its thrills are of the action-packed, not nail-biting, variety—but it delivers its share of gore. People are eviscerated and dispatched in all manner of grimdark ways, especially in some of the more heinous histories of these tragic figures, so anyone looking for a little bloodletting will be rewarded. But far more rewarding is the artfully arranged nature of the story. This is a fine reworking of a genre exercise: pulpy without feeling trashy, conventional without feeling unintelligent, and always geared toward delivering maximum enjoyment. It’s about time we had another good slasher beach read.
Author photo: Albert Mitchell
23 Comments
I picked up My Best Friend’s Exorcism during an Audible sale a while back and really enjoyed it. I’ve been meaning to check out more of Hendrix’s books, and this sounds right up my alley.
I agree! They’re so soapy and fun, with a great streak of That’s Legitimately Gross/Terrifying running through them.
he excels at crafting passages where readers can lose themselves in the frenetic fun of just seeing what happens next
Having picked up Southern Book Club based on the title and the marketing summary, I have to say that while I enjoyed it…I wouldn’t call it “frenetic fun.”Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book and it deals with some seriously interesting material. But if you’re expecting a quirky concept with dark humor….it’s not that.So with that in mind. Is this the same thing? The elevator pitch “A support group for Final Girls…” sounds quirky, but are we dealing with a straight horror book in the same vein as Book Club?
(“I’ve dealt with some higher-level astral bullshit that would make you drop a log in your satin panties,” goes one unfortunate effort.) Aw come on, this is an obvious an homage to the insane folksy dialogue of one S. King.
*fauxlksy
“I’ve dealt with some higher-level astral bullshit that would make you drop a log in your satin panties,”Sounds like it could come from a Buffy reboot on Netflix.
supernatural thrillers Grady Hendrix is a horror writer. He writes horror. This may seem pedantic, but refusing to label books horror is why the horror section in most bookstores is either nonexistent or practically so. The film trend of embracing horror (even though labeling it “elevated” in order to do so) has not yet fully permeated into the writing world.The same thing happened when “Mexican Gothic” broke through a couple of years ago, and everyone kept calling it a thriller or just “gothic.” Maybe that’s all coming from the publisher side, and not the reviewer side, but it is still frustrating for those of us who love horror fiction. I read “Mexican Gothic,” and it was a horror novel, same with the works of Grady Hendrix.
Critics will jump through any number of hoops to avoid having to use the H word.
Similarly, literary authors may write “speculative fiction” but certainly not “science fiction”. Margaret Atwood basically has made her career on writing things that wouldn’t get the critical acclaim they do if they were published as paperback original SF.
Genre designation is directed by the publisher, who are directed by the brick-and-mortar booksellers, who demand clear delineation for their in-store shelving. It’s got nothing to do with the stigma of horror and everything to do with “how do we best position this so that consumers who actually read and buy books (aka women) will take a chance on an impulse purchase.”Beyond that, if there is stigma around horror that prevents the casual entry of women into its readership, it’s nothing that the masters of the 70s and 80s (King, Straub, McCammon, Ketchem, etc etc) didn’t earn on its behalf. Hendrix is a canny operator and very consciously distances himself from them, if implicitly. His titles and vibe are a far cry from, say, po-faced Ligotti fandom. Those people don’t get their friends to buy books. Suburban women who run “grip-lit” / thriller book clubs? Very different story.
Thank you. I had no idea Southern Book Club was straight horror until I started reading it. It’s title and listings suggested it was something quirky.I was surprised by the curtain coming back and the horror coming in, but thankfully I enjoy those types of stories as well so I was pleasantly surprised.But yeah, it’s a disservice to readers to not just call something a horror book when that’s what it is. It makes it harder to find horror books for those who seek them, and it turns some people off horror when they trip and fall in to one but weren’t expecting it.
Very strong and twisty, falls apart a bit at the end, but absolutely worth reading if you’re a fan of slashers. There’s some, eh, deep cuts in it. And it has some pretty interesting takes on paranoia and life after trauma. Lynette’s flaws *are* her strengths, which is a pretty neat trick that Hendrix pulls off. Definitely a great beach/summer read. Recommended!
he flops at writing women at the beginning, and using the support group model and then bashing the drug abusing character was almost enough to put the book down, but he definitely seems to figure out Lynette the more he writes, and the book gets better!
Are Lynette and Lynnette two different people?
Paperbacks from Hell, his history of 70s and 80s horror fiction, is kind of an amazing book, it really pulls together a lot of obscure as well as better known stuff
Agreed, that’s a great one I’ve recommended to folks interested in the genre more than once.
The premise of multiple sslasher murders having really happened sounds a bit like “Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon”.
I get really distracted by pop culture references in books that are set in alternate versions of our world – I start thinking about “would Star Wars have existed in a world where X exists?”
Not to mention the “celebrity paradox” — as in, how are there actors who look exactly like famous real people in these universes — like does anyone notice that Harrison Ford looks just like Indiana Jones in a world where Indy was real? Last Action Hero did the cute bit where we learn that in the world in which Schwarzenegger’s Jack Slater exists The Terminator was filmed as well. Except since Schwarzenegger doesn’t exist in this universe, Sylvester Stallone stars in it.
Let me introduce you to the Armageddon: The Musical trilogy by Robert Rankin where the lead character *is* the splitting image of Harrison Ford and people *do* notice but it does take a back seat as he teams up with Elvis to fight the Antichrist who has been reincarnated as the latest incarnation of the Dalai Lama, Dalai Dan – host of the game show Nemesis – in a post apocalyptic wasteland. Did I also mention time travel is involved (of course) and the lead also ends up married to Jesus’s sister?No-one can replace Douglas Adams but Robert Rankin at his best comes remarkably close.
as in, how are there actors who look exactly like famous real people in these universes —
Didn’t Ocean’s 11 hang a lampshade on this by having Julia Robert’s character impersonate Julia Roberts?
Horrorstor was pretty clever. Paperbacks from Hell also looks interesting, so I’m going to have put this one on my reading list.
There is a book called “Final Girls” with the same exact color scheme and almost same exact premise.