I watched a lot of slasher movies growing up although I've moved away from that genre. But in the 90's, I was OBSESSED with the movie Scream. So The Final Girl Support Group was 100% right up my alley. I devoured this book in approximately 24 hours. I loved all the homage to the movies. I did figure out the "who" in advance but I wasn't mad about it. There was enough going on that I still enjoyed it through the end. This was a fun thriller and if you loved Scream or 80's slasher movies, you will enjoy this book too.

Thank you to Berkeley Publishing and Netgalley for the electronic advanced copy of this book.

Grady Hendrix's The Final Girl Support Group pays homage to the slasher film and all the movie franchises that were spawned by the genre. The novel revolves around a group of women and their therapist. All the women were "final girls" the ones that survived a mass murder against all odds. Now years later their group is splintering as they are all finding ways to deal with the traumas they survived. But then one of their group is viciously murdered and soon it would appear that someone is trying to kill them all. The book revolves around Lynette, the one girl in the group who doesn't feel like she quite belongs. Was she a true final girl? She is not sure and as she races from the evil that is trying to kill them all she has a chance to prove she is indeed a part of this group that no one really wants to belong to.

This book reads exactly like the slasher films that inspired it. It moves at a rapid pace never giving the reader time to catch their breath. It is incredibly violent and the twists and turns never stop coming. The reader isn't given time to add up the fact that how the narrative went from point A to point B doesn't quite add up. There are red herrings galore and the reader is constantly kept on edge much a like films of the genre keep the viewer on the edge of their seat.

This was a fun book to read and as someone that grew up watching all of the slasher franchises of the 80s and 90s, it was especially exciting to see how Hendrix turned the genre into a novel. While paying homage the films he was able to create his own niche genre of cinematic horror fiction. This is a book that will keep Hendrix's growing legion of fans anticipating his continued reinvigoration and reimagining of the horror genre. Thank you to NetGalley and Berkeley publishing for an advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest and fair review.

If you’re one of those people who enjoying yelling at the characters on screen during slasher movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, this book is for you. You’ll find yourself reminiscing.

This support group is exactly what it sounds like – these six women are literally the final girls left standing, each the survivor of real-life horrific situations that were turned into movies. What the slasher movies never show is the fallout of surviving, the paranoia, guilt, and fears these women are left to struggle with. Some are dealing with things better than others, but Lynnette isn’t one of those people. Except for the support group, she’s cut herself off from everyone, has essentially barricaded her apartment (where her roommate is a beloved pepper plant she speaks to – and he talks back), stashed weapons and cash in hiding places, and has numerous escape plans. She’s certain it’s only a matter of time before someone else shows up to finish her off. And then her worst fears are realized when someone kills one of the final girls and then makes attempts on the lives of the other five.

As with the classic slasher movies, you can expect gruesome and gory scenes, some cheesy lines, and poor decisions made by the characters. The climax of the book plays out exactly like the final movie scene – a little long, kind of over the top, with plenty of injuries and blood. I’d guessed the “villain” early on, but I still enjoyed watching the characters piece it together. Another reviews I read pointed out that the final girl characters are named after the actresses who played final girls in slasher classics from the 70s and 80s, something I thought was a clever detail the author added.

I was a fan of those movies in their day so I found this to be a nostalgic, entertaining read. If you’re not familiar with those films, keep in mind they’re a little campy and this book follows that pattern. Not recommended for the squeamish when it comes to gore and violence – you may want to steer clear.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Having read two other books by Grady Hendrix, I was sadly disappointed by this one!

What I liked:
- Fun, fast-paced plot
- Homage to many horror movie franchises
- Engaging and easy to read

What I didn't like:
- NO character development whatsoever
- Felt very gimmicky.. Almost too much
- Weak/no motivation for the person/persons responsible for the murders
- Hard not to compare to his other works, which I liked better

Well, Hendrix has done it again: given us another wild ride of a story full of twists and turns you don't see coming...and telling it in the kind of fashion only he can.

The story moves at a fast clip, continuously propelling us forward from one set piece to another with plenty of action and wit. I finished this in two sittings, I wanted to see how it would all unfold! If I only have one gripe, which kept me from giving it five stars, is that I feel like he focused more on the stories/set-ups than he did on the characters, It took awhile before I could "tell them apart". I feel like he barely scratched the surface of these ladies; that he might have fallen into the very trope he was lampooning, which are stock characters. Had he delved a bit deeper with them, we'd be fist-pumping the air by the end as they stage their final stand against the bad guys instead of going through the motions to see how the story would wrap-up.

But that doesn't take away from the enjoyment of the book, and I think he may have another hit on his hands. It felt like I was reading a movie...and I hope this gets adapted into one!

Another fantastic novel from Grady Hendrix, who can pen characters so convincing you feel like you're in the story with them and are totally cool with that, even when it's a horror story.

*full review closer to pub date via The Nerd Daily*

For "Final Girl" Lynnette Tarkington, everyone except for her group of real-life Final Girls (last one standing in horror films) has the potential to be a monster. Perpetually on guard and ready with multiple survival plans, Lynnette is our point of view throughout. Fans of horror movies spanning the 1970s to the 1990s will recognize the women and their franchises. When their monthly support group teeters on disbandment, everything unravels with quickly. Fast-paced and full of nods to classic slashers, "The Final Girl Support Group" never lets up or lets you off easy. Alongside the constant threats to their safety and sanity, is plenty of food for thought about murdering women as entertainment and what happens after the credits roll. Highly recommended for your next trip to the lake, abandoned summer camp, or curled up at home.

What. Did. I. Just. Read? Very interesting plot! What happens to all of the “Final Girls”? The ones who don’t get killed by mass murderers? The lone survivors. Apparently, a lot.

Lynette is a Final Girl who survives 2 brutal murder attempts. Because of that, she is paranoid and has some serious OCD. She is part of the Final Girl Support Group, along with Marilyn, Dani, Heather, Julia, Adrienne and Doctor Carol. Someone yet again, is attacking all final girls, who could it be? Who can they trust when they can’t even trust themselves?

This book had some serious twists and turns, very much unlike actual slasher films. It was a wild ride from the start, and it felt to me like it was 5 stories in one. That is the only way I can describe it. It was a bit odd to me, some of the dialog and thought processes. They almost seemed... childish? However, the pace of the book made up for that and some of the inconsistencies.

I would recommend this book. It wasn’t amazing, but it sure does the job. Very odd & a little unsettling, but it’s worth a read.

This book has suck=h an interesting premise. All the "final girls" in horror movies get together once a month in a church basement from group therapy. Then. They start being hunted, one by one. Who will be the FINAL final girl?

I am not one for scary movies. They are scary. I don't like it. But books are fine!

I liked the idea of the book and that the final girls are out living their lives. Some have turned their tragedy into something positive for others, some have turned to substances to help them cope, some take three hours to get home after a meeting just in case someone is still trying to kill them.

The twist though! So many plausible twist. I didn't know who to trust (much like our main character) when every possible suspect made so much sense! Until the one that no one was expecting! Insanity.

I think this would be a good movie adaptation. I might even go see it! Or, at least watch it in the safety of my own home where I can cover my eyes if need be!

Thank you to NetGalley, Berkley Publishing, and Grady Hendrix for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Just wow. I loved this book from the first page. If you are a fan of Gillian Flynn, you won't want to miss this magnificent nod to final girls and secret society that thrives on murder memoribilia. Unreliable MC, but perfect in her view of the world based on the crap hand she's been dealt. Loved every roller coaster ride moment and can't wait to share this book with my customers at the store. #awesome #moreplease #wow

I was really amazed by this book! I loved the connection to classic horror films like Friday the 13th; that was really well done. I also thought Lynette's characterization was so good! From her obsession with keeping herself protected (totally understandable) to her anxiety and ocd, I thought she was a great and well-developed character. Overall, the concept of the book was fantastic, and readers will be left with their mouths hanging open by the end of the book.

Grady Hendrix does it again. Another awesome read in the horror genre. A support group for final girls. Those girls who fight off their attacker and live to tell the tale. I loved the added slasher movie references throughout the book, some I had never heard of. It wasn't as gory as some of Grady's other books, but it still had some jump scenes to keep me invested in reading. Great read for fans of this genre!

Another home run from Hendrix. I very much admire authors who can pull of the trick of writing the Thing while both poking fun at it and making a thorough examination and Hendrix not only does it in The Final Girl Support Group but does it well. As with vampire dramas and the satanic panic, the slasher film is something both of its time and eternal, something both mass market and deep, corny and meaningful and The Final Girl Support Group looks at the genre from both sides and every angle, reminding us it's okay to have fun but also important to examine. Why do we enjoy watching girls run for their lives? Why are all of the monsters men? Why is the final girl always a virgin?
Of course, it wouldn't be a Grady Hendrix book without fantastic characters and smart snark. Plus a little surprise at the end you know you should have seen coming but never could have, The Final Girl Support Group is definitely in my top ten of 2021 so far. Can't wait for the next!

I only recently was introduced to the concept of "final girls", but I quickly became a fan. The Final Girl Support Group examines how it changes their lives to survive. How the credits roll and we think, "they survived!" but how we never think about what kind of life they are going to live. The ways in which the world takes them and rips them apart. All the ways in which people want to disprove them, re-traumatize them, and to fetishize their experiences.

While I was definitely drawn to the action in The Final Girl Support Group, I am normally drawn to character driven stories. This book is almost exclusively action, even while it delves into the women's memories and trauma, the ways their thinking patterns have changed. The Final Girl Support Group manages to balance introspection and action. It easily appeals to those searching for a mystery or thriller, I just wanted a bit more out of the characters.

I absolutely loved this book! If you are a fan of slasher movies then you are going to love The Final Girls Support Group.

It is fast paced and has so many breakneck twists and turns. It is an exiting novel perfect for any thrill seeker.

If this year is the Year of the Robot, then last year (2020) was the Year of Grady Hendrix. His new title is everything you can hope for in your horror satire. It piggybacked ahead of most of the titles on my to-read list because having a Grady Hendrix book on your shelf is like having chips in your pantry. You can't resist eating them, and once you do, you demolish the whole bag.

While I didn't like it as much as My Best Friend's Exorcism or Southern Book Club, it has the same compulsively readable quality as those titles. If you like your books to be (relatively) nonstop action with lots of twists and turns, and if you've seen lots of 80's and 90's slasher flicks, then this will be your jam, right down to figuring out which real-world franchise each Final Girl represents.

The other Final Girls were a bit light on characterization, and there was a REAL missed opportunity where Heather's story with the Dream King kept getting glossed over, but that's par for the course when you're expected to fill in a backstory with franchise info. (Not unlike reading fanfic.) The number of twists at the end was enough to give me whiplash, but as a whole, very satisfying for fans of the genre and plenty of teen interest.

I had extremely high hopes for this book. I had heard that Hendrix was a master storyteller, one of the best authors writing horror today. But within a dozen pages, I was bored to frustration. The writing was unimaginative, characters so bad as to be bordering on sexist. Is the comedy and horror supposed to be that men are preying on women and women are tired of it? Women experience that everyday, so why would they need a man to write about it. I would never recommend this book and would honestly recommend readers stay away. Extremely frustrating.

In Grady Hendrix’s utterly gripping new novel, The Final Girl Support Group, we join a therapy circle of five women who have survived mass murders years after the events that traumatized them and splashed them across the headlines. Our narrator, Lynnette, is the odd one out because she didn’t kill the person responsible—but that’s not to say that she doesn’t carry psychological scars as well as physical ones. By the time we meet the group, any healing is long in their rearview. They bicker and hurl insults at each other. It’s not an auspicious beginning for a conspiracy that will threaten all of their lives once again.

Lynnette—like the others in the group—has faced death twice. She’s lost two families to seriously violent and mentally ill men. Her response to her trauma has been to become extremely paranoid. Her apartment is a fortress. She uses elaborate evasive maneuvers to go anywhere, to shake anyone who might follow her. She is rigorous about her fitness routine so that she can run and fight. She’s so ready to see danger everywhere that even the other final girls think she’s a little crazy with her precautions. Those same precautions come in handy when someone starts attacking the final girls yet again.

After Lynnette’s apartment suddenly becomes unsafe, she puts her bug-out plans into action at the same time that she starts to ask everyone who will talk to her questions about who might be targeting them. All the people who attacked them in the past are either dead or in prison. Who’s left that wants them dead? What follows is one of the twistiest (but still plausible) series of action scenes and conspiracy that I’ve ever read. It’s funny that many of the members of the support group had movies made about their experiences because this book is also one of the most cinematic books I’ve ever read. I could see this book play out in my head as Lynnette dodged and ran and fought. There are several moments that are the closest things to a jump scare that literature can achieve outside of The Pop-up Book of Phobias.

The Final Girl Support Group is one of the tensest books I’ve ever read. Almost immediately after that unpleasant meeting of the group, the plot never slows down. The only breaks we get (if you can call them breaks) are snippets of criticism about horror movies based on what happened to Lynnette and the other members of the group and pieces of their testimonies after everything was over. The plot moves almost too fast—certainly too fast to linger too much over the deeper themes the book introduces. For example, there are references to and excerpts from speeches by another final girl who was able to turn earnings from a horror movie series (based on her experiences but made without her permission) into efforts to stop violence against women and to help girls and women heal. There are further brief mentions of how real violence is fictionalized in slasher flicks and horror movies for mass entertainment. What makes this kind of entertainment okay? Why are so many people so enamored of media coverage of horrific murders? The Final Girl Support Group races past these questions to get to the next chase or fight. I don’t really fault The Final Girl Support Girl for its speed. These questions and others are still with me; they’ll probably be food for thought for a while.

One thing I love is a good scary movie from the 1980s, before horror movies became all about the gore and shock value. When I read the synopsis of Grady Hendrix's novel, The Final Girl Support Group, I knew it was something I would have to read. It follows the lives of several "final girls" decades after they each became the sole survivor in their own real-life horror movie. Many of these women's tales inspired hokey film franchises and tell-all books written by horror-obsessed fans. Lynette is one of these final girls and finds life after tragedy to be difficult, to put it mildly. Scared that she'll one day be the target of a psychotic killer again, she practically lives as a shut-in, literally behind a cage she's installed in her apartment. She has no one in her life, besides a plant she talks to and her fellow final girls, who meet monthly for a group therapy session in secret. All of Lynette's precautions prove inadequate though when the final girls become the target of someone who wants them all dead. She must face her fears of the outside world and put decades' worth of preparation into action if she wants to survive and save the only people who understand her.

This book was a fun read! It got a bit over-the-top with the gore and violence for me in a few bits, but I'm not going to hold that against the story because it is in the appropriate horror genre. It honestly felt like I was watching a modern-day horror movie. There were a lot of connections to famous horror films like Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Scream, just to name a few. I found myself spooked quite a few times while reading this late at night when I was the only one in the house awake. My biggest complaint is that the ending to the big scene at the end seemed a little rushed. I went back a few pages just to make sure I hadn't accidentally skipped over a big chunk because I couldn't really believe that was it. The build up to the scene was great and then it just deflated. There were also several instances throughout the novel where the characters were just too unbelievable or stared to annoy me. Lynette could be very repetitive and whiny. Also, there's no way the cops would have acted towards Lynette the way they did in the novel. I mean, they refuse her right to a lawyer, lock her up for days while taunting her with graphic material related to her traumatic past. Maybe a handful of cops would've been jerks, but an entire station psychologically abusing someone like that without repercussions just seems so far-fetched.

Overall, The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix is worth your time, especially if you're a fan of classic horror movies. Despite some minor issues with the story, it is mostly fast-paced and suspenseful with some surprising twists and a lot of bad-ass female characters.

*Thanks to the author, Berkley Publishing Group, and Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!

“One is none, and two is one”

Grady Hendrix has a knack for writing really weird books. I mean did you read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Vampire Slaying?? If you did, than you know that while his books are classified as horror stories, they’re generally way more than your typical horror stories.

So what is a Final Girl? A Final Girl is a common trope in horror films such as Friday the 13th and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The Final Girl is the last girl or women that is left alive and ends up confronting the killer, generally killing them in the process. In this book, Hendrix is exploring what happens to those girls and how they cope with and struggle to keep on living.

Lynnette Tarkington survived her monster 22 years ago. Nothing about her life is normal. Now she’s struggling with anxiety and counts on her monthly sessions with her fellow Final Girls to get through things. After 16 years of relaying on the other 5 girls within the group, Lynnette is going to need to face that the ties that bond them all together are quickly fraying. But when one of the girls ends up murdered and another attacked, Lynnette is positive that someone has it out for the Final Girls. Now if only she can get her act together, she might be able to save not just herself but the other final girls as well.

Y’all this book is crazy.

It’s a completely fast paced, page turning thriller. Each final girl introduced within the story is based off an old school movie.

Dani based on Halloween

Julia based on Scream

Heather based on The Nightmare on Elm Street

Adrienne based on Friday the 13th

Marilyn based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I really enjoyed the way Hendrix introduced each of the character’s stories and tied them to the plot line. I’m not a huge slasher/horror movie fan but even for me I felt myself pulled into the story. I’ll also say that while this book is entirely based on the classic horror movies, it’s less ‘scary’ than I thought it would be. There is definitely gore, violence, and murder within the story, so if any of those items are triggers for you I would advise not to read this book, but it isn’t ‘Can’t sleep without the lights on’ scary. I’d almost categorize this story as more Thriller than Horror, but that is just my personal opinion.

I know some people will think automatically of Riley Sager’s Final Girls which released a few years ago, but they are completely different. They both deal with the trope of ‘Final Girls’ but that is where their similarities stop. Sager’s is more of a classic whodunnit mystery/thriller, while Hendrix’s story is based solely upon the classic slasher films. Hendrix’s is by far a more entertaining and faster pace horror story.

In true Hendrix fashion, The Final Girls Support Group, is a mesh between a Thriller and Campy horror story. It’s incredibly fast paced, with lots of distinct characters. If you loved the era of slasher films, campy horror movies, and fast paced stories than this book is for you.

The Final Girls Support Group comes out July 13, 2021. Huge thank you to Berkley for my advanced copy for my honest review. If you liked this review please let me know either by commenting below or by visiting my Instagram @speakingof_books.