The Disability Book Archive

[ID: A book cover. The background is solid black, with the large image of a folding chair covered in red blood down the middle. Text from top to bottom of the cover reads:
The title “The Final Girl Support Group” in large, cream caps.
“A novel” in small cream caps
The author’s name “Grady Hendrix” in large cream caps
The sentence “New York Times bestselling author of ‘THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB’S GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES’” in small cream writing. /end]

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Content Warning:

• Murder
• Violence
• Death
• Alcoholism
• Panic Attacks
• Blood
• Injury/Injury Detail
• Drug Use
• Guns
• Torture
• Kidnapping
• Police Brutality
• Medical Content
• Stalking
• Sexual Violence
• Cancer
• Child Death
• Suicidal Ideation

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Summary:

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.

Lynnette 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.

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Notes:

This is a book based on the “final girl” horror movie trope, containing pop-cultural references to classic horror movies.

This book won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror 2021.

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Archivist Comments:

I think this was the first horror that I added to the spreadsheet.

So the general consensus seems to be that this is an interesting book, with a good concept and parts of it were executed really well, but a lot of Hendrix’s regular readers have said that it was maybe not his best work. Some people also think that (spoilers) the representation in areas falls flat i.e. the only black character dies off page, and the main character is unlikeable. Though some people think that that was a purposeful choice. There was also critique directed at the fact that the novel draws so heavily on slasher tropes that sometimes it doesn’t feel original in places.

However, there was a lot of praise directed towards Hendrix’s discussions regarding the general misogyny and stereotyping of both the horror genre and real world situations i.e. the challenges the girls deal with in getting help and how this is impacted by their gender.

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