The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix (2021) As much as we enjoyed this book, we don't know if we'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't have at least a passing familiarity with 1980's slasher horror movies and their various tropes.
For those who do have an extensive or even a nodding acquaintance with this genre. then by all means dive in, cause this is one wild read, steeped to the max in slasher move lore.....and gore.
To create the elaborate meta premise here, author Grady Hendrix creates his his own fictional batch of 1980's slasher movies, complete with cast lists, plots and production histories (obviously inspired by the actual real movies like the Halloween and Friday The 13th series.
Hendrix's faux-slasher franchises are in turn fictionalized versions of the horrific adolescence suffered by his lead characters - women now in their mid to late 30's who as teens, became the last girls standing after a variety of ax and knife wielding lunatics slaughtered their friends, classmates, camp-mates and families.
These traumatized, PTSD-afflicted woman meet in a therapy support group run by sympathetic psychiatrist......but years of stress and lives riddled with misfortunes have begun to sour them on the sessions and on each other personally......
.......and then person or persons unknown launch a synchronized brutal attack on all them, with the intent of putting a final end to all the Final Girls.
We realize that this stuff sounds like deliciously gruesome fun and for the most part, it is.......but there's a truly disturbing undercurrent that Hendrix adds to all this non-top carnage.....
In this book's depressing (but all too true) worldview, the Final Girls continue to live in fear from the warped new world of social media.....where trolls of every kind, given free reign to give in to their darkest impulses, obsess over the girls and seek them out of kill them off in order to enjoy their own fifteen minutes of fame.
Hendrix aims unerring satirical arrows over our popular culture fixated with true crime and madness......you won't know whether to laugh out loud or grimace while shaking your head. You will sit stunned in WTF amazement at the outrageous twist that reveals who's behind the plot to wipe out the final girls.
Quite a thrill ride, this one. Since we spent a large part of the 1980's purchasing large quantities of slasher movies for video stores, we could hardly resist......4 stars (****).
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