Author Grady Hendrix tends to wear his influences on his sleeves. Or perhaps more accurately, Hendrix has a particular way of retooling familiar horror stories with his blend of humor and heartwarming sincerity. The author puts his characters through horrific scenarios without ever losing sight of the human element. Hendrix’s latest, The Final Girl Support Group, offers his take on what happens long after a Final Girl survived a night of traumatic slaughter. It hits the ground running, plunging his Final Girls back into a fight for survival while meditating on what it means to live.
Lynette Tarkington has never been the same ever since that fateful night that claimed the lives of everyone she knew at age sixteen. Her apartment doubles as a barricaded fortress. The Final Girl takes extra precautions to ensure she’s not being followed, including her routine support group that assembles other women like her- women who survived the unthinkable. However, her precarious way of life gets shattered when one woman doesn’t show up to the meeting. Lynette’s worst fears are realized; someone is out to destroy the Final Girls.
Hendrix pens one big love letter to the Final Girl. Each of the core group members will tick off nostalgia boxes for the slasher fan. All borrow from prominent slasher films, with Lynette’s backstory providing the biggest surprise and subversion. In a wry, meta-turn of events, these Final Girls outlived, and their success stories inspired popular horror film franchises that left many of them financially set up for life. Despite regular therapy sessions for decades, these Final Girls remain broken in some way, their lives irrevocably shattered. Money can’t buy happiness. Despite all connected by this singularly traumatic experience of surviving a massacre, the toll it took on them all meant that these women barely get along in the best circumstances. But just as the author gets us acquainted, he pulls the rug out from under you and catapults the story into overdrive.
The weak link of the group, Lynette, is forced from her tenuous place of comfort into a perilous journey. She’s on the run and deemed an enemy by nearly everyone, but Final Girls never quit, do they? Hendrix puts his characters through the absolute wringer. It’s a bloody, vicious voyage for the flawed heroine, both physically and emotionally. In terms of action and horror, Support Group delivers breakneck pacing and thrills.
Nestled within the chaos that puts Final Girls back in the crosshairs of a new slasher mystery is a dissection of the subgenre itself. Hendrix takes aim at the cultural obsession with serial killers and their violence by giving an intimate look at the aftermath. Support Group intentionally never bothers fleshing out any of the slasher icons that birthed the Final Girls in the first place; it’s the victims who matter. It’s the victims and survivors that deserve the spotlight. This approach makes Hendrix’s latest accessible both for slasher fans and those who hate slashers.
The Final Girl Support Group moves at an incredibly fast pace, pummeling its heroine over and over again as she gets a second, or third, chance at redemption. Through Lynette’s brutal, blood-drenched discovery of what it means to live, Hendrix offers an examination of the slasher and the fascination with them. The novel adheres a little too close to the Final Girls’ cinematic counterparts, though. Using that framework allows the story to hit the ground running, but it dampens the originality to an extent. While parts of the ending feel rushed in places, Lynette’s journey brings catharsis, unpredictable detours, and thoughtful insight into one of horror’s most popular subgenres.
The Final Girl Support Group releases on July 13.
