As someone who can’t watch horror movies or read horror unless it’s light outside, I’m surprised by how much I enjoyed this.
In The Final Girl Support Group we get to see a little of what happens after the bloodbath. We get to see how these final girls – the ones who survive indescribably horrific experiences – cope once normal life resumes. Having to live with the knowledge that you (probably) killed someone to survive and (usually) watched close family members and friends murdered in increasingly brutal ways is going to have an impact. I can’t imagine how you pick yourself up and carry on after this.
When we’re first introduced to the group – a disparate group of women whose only link is they are known by the ‘final girl’ moniker – we can see many of them are not able to let go. Our main narrator is Lynette, who clearly is struggling to feel safe in real life. When she learns that one of their group has been murdered we start to think she may have been right to express reservations about how they’re managing.
The book focuses on Lynette’s increasingly bizarre attempts to make the others think she’s right to be scared. They react badly, and things get very awkward. There’s some darkly amusing moments as Lynette and the other survivors attempt to get to the bottom of these attacks and take on – for one last time – their bogeyman.
Initially a little slow as we establish the characters and the setup. There was a section once things started kicking off where the water got very muddy as the characters got sidetracked by a manuscript telling their stories and I wondered how this would sustain my interest. Then Hendrix lets us a little deeper into these women, fleshes them out a little and has them barrelling towards the ultimate fight for survival. At this point I couldn’t wait to see who was behind things and how events would be resolved.
While it seems Hendrix is a huge fan of the slasher movie, and clearly knows the conventions, it feels a little dated and I’m not sure how you can move past this. The reliance on stock characters/moments lends a sense of familiarity, and we’re encouraged to see these characters as real people, but ultimately it’s more of the same misogyny. I concede there’s some challenging of these attitudes but the characters remain trapped by our expectations for the genre. As a result, it feels like more of the same. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, will express this more articulately than I have.