Welcome to the Final Girl Support Group – Grady Hendrix’s Latest Delivers as Expected!

Demon-possessed, blood drenched teenage girls aimlessly running in the woods… Cursed heavy metal songs with the best lyrics since the invention of heavy metal and a music festival to end the world… A warehouse full of haunted ready-to-assemble and ready-to-kill furniture… Sexy vampires kindling the struggle of the sexes in US suburbia… The battle of tropes breaking loose when a group of final girls is confronted with a timelier horror trope…

Over the past decade Grady Hendrix has been gradually working his way upwards from class clown of horror literature to seriously credible writer who, with each new work, manages to reinvent a new subgenre of horror. Now you may or may not like his style, you may say he’s not hard enough for a horror writer, but there is one thing in particular that you can never say about Hendrix; that he is not a feminist. Each and every one of his books displays the story of yet another woman otherwise overlooked and erased, brought into the spotlight by Hendrix. Two young girls discovering the importance of friendship… A middle-aged former singer who has been lied to and broken, who has been cheated her claim to fame and fortune and has no choice left but to work night shifts at a hotel… A group of housewives who are being belittled and degraded by their husbands even though they are crucial… And finally, in his last book The Final Girl Support Group, as the title so glaringly reveals, a bunch of women who survived murder attacks and need to learn to live with the trauma of it.

Lynnette, Julia, Marilyn, Heather, Dani and Adrienne. Mark those names because you will spend some time with these women if you want to embark on the Final Girl Support Group-journey. Each one of them attacked by a maniac killer at different points in the 80s and 90s and each of them survived by fighting back. Some of them even twice. Beside surviving the brutal assaults, they also endured the belittlement of the public, the idolization of their perpetrators, their killers becoming pop culture phenomena and sixteen years of therapy sessions with Dr. Carol Elliott, who specializes on their kind of trauma - on final girls.

We should be sitting in a circle, but the five of us sit in a ragged C because none of us will ever put her back to a door again.

Just as they are discussing the possibility of finally ending therapy, things happen to suggest that maybe it’s not all over yet and there is more danger to come. But it is only Lynnette, ironically the psychologically most damaged of the bunch, who rightly notices the imminence of the situation and her attempts at warning the others are being brushed aside as her usual shenanigans. For Lynnette, this is the beginning of a very exhausting and frustrating game of hide and seek which will lead to an emotional and glorious finale - the kind of fantastic ending we’re used from Grady Hendrix.

The Final Girl Support Group could have been a breathless one-sitting and five-stars read for me. It could have been, but unfortunately wasn't because of what I think are some pacing problems. Especially in the first third where we are being introduced to Lynnette’s world full of paranoia, safety measures, security systems, door-locks, panic rooms, coping mechanisms and and and… Lynnette’s life is every single tiktok video about tips and hacks for women’s safety and it was just too detailed here.

Now, I understand the necessity of elaborately describing the trauma and the coping mechanisms of a survivor in order to highlight the book’s main idea, but about a third of the book consisting of Lynnette running around like a headless chicken and the constant downward spiral coupled with the frustration her non-credibility generates was a little too much for me. Luckily there is a turning point around the midway mark of the story, which also characterizes most Hendrix books: when shit hits the fan and you think things can’t get any worse, they start getting better. I was really happy that from this point on the story picked up pace, leading to a grandiose resolution. So it is pace, or the lack thereof, that is the key to my criticism here. Hendrix just spends too much time lingering around in the first part of the book, slowing its flow. Once you get past the middle though, it totally pays off to have persevered.

But what does it say about us that so much of the entertainment we consume is about killing women? I want you to think about that. How is the murder of women fun?

Whether the final girl trope is in its core a feministic or misogynistic genre has been discussed and re-discussed to bits and pieces over the past five decades and I don’t intend to repeat any of that here. Being the expert that he is, Hendrix truly impresses in The Final Girl Support Group with his extensive knowledge and critical views on slashers: from cinematic theories on what lies beneath the fascination, to the problematic marketing, to cheering fans and copycat killers - he knows, flaunts and deconstructs it all here to present a picture as complete as possible of this controversial genre.

What I especially enjoyed -just like every fictional song, book, film of Hendrix’ invention- were the pastiche slasher movies invented as counterparts to each murder attempt on the members of group; Stab, Summer Slaughters, The Babysitter Murders, Deadly Dreams, Panhandle Meat Hook, Slay Bells and Gnomecoming are all fictional movie franchises based on the real-life murder attempts on our final girls and are hilariously and in-depth, with synopses, production stories and all, presented to the reader to enjoy.

I know what happens to those girls. They turn into women.

All things considered, The Final Girl Support Group gives an outdated, problematic genre a timely, deconstructive polish and that comes strong in the time of #shewaswalkinghome and increasing cases of femicide all around the world. It does have its weaknesses, but is at the same time super interesting, has a great ending and is very much worth a read - absolutely recommended!