Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2021
352 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives…but what happens after?
Like his bestselling novel The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix's latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films—movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.
Lynette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she's been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.
But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.
"A wildly entertaining romp through the conventions of horror's slasher film subgenre…Hendrix masterfully evokes the paranoid existences of his diverse cast in the aftermath of their traumatic ordeals, and he so explicitly details the massacres and fictional film sagas that grew out of them that readers may believe them to be real. The result is a wonderfully suspenseful and darkly comic novel that cleverly subverts popular culture. Horror fans will be wowed." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Hendrix presents yet another thought-provoking, fun, and chilling winner with perfect timing, as the slasher novel seems to be trending. A great choice for fans of Night of the Mannequins, by Stephen Graham Jones, or Clown in a Cornfield, by Adam Cesare, but also for readers who loved the darkly humorous but intense psychological suspense of My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite." - Library Journal (starred review)
"You have to give it to Hendrix...for tapping into his deep knowledge of horror films and fiction to find a new angle on the tropes of terror with every outing...A bloody and grotesque but ultimately entertaining and inspiring take on horror movies, trauma, and self-determination." - Kirkus Reviews
"A great read…[Hendrix] excels at writing horror humor…His characters are funny and real, though at least one will definitely lose a limb at some point…Though the final girls' plight has all the scares of great horror fiction, there is an element of truth in their situation that will be recognizable to anyone who has experienced real trauma." – New York Times
"If you grew up on a diet of '80s slasher movies, The Final Girl Support Group is the book you've been waiting for...Clever, fast-paced horror comedy." - Oprah Daily
"The Final Girl Support Group is funny, scary, and a roaring good time. Grady Hendrix puts his own spin on final girls and I loved it." - Samantha Downing, USA Today bestselling author of My Lovely Wife
"Take slasher movie adoration, critique, and satire, mix with compelling, flawed characters and neck-breaking plot twists, and drop it all into an industrial blender with large blades. Voilà, you now have Grady's maniacally clever and compulsively readable The Final Girl Support Group." - Paul Tremblay, national bestselling author of Survivor Song
This information about The Final Girl Support Group was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter based in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend's Exorcism, Paperbacks from Hell, and We Sold Our Souls, all of which received critical praise from outlets including NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, the A.V. Club, Paste, Buzzfeed, and more. He has contributed to Playboy, the Village Voice, and Variety.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
