Final Girls are the ones who end up surviving at the end of a horror movie and in Hendrix's world, all horror movies are based on true-life events. The Final Girl world is small, and a group of them meet every month in Burbank, California with a therapist. However after years of living with the trauma and trying to work through it (with very mixed results) the group is splintering at the seams - and the only one who seems to care is Lynette Tarkington - who, if you get down to brass tacks - isn't really a Final Girl. Oh sure, she survived a massacre, but did so by playing dead - which is not the same thing. She did not actively stop a monster, she simply waited to be rescued. But she's in the club, so to speak, and is the only one who seems to care when one of their group misses the latest meeting. Turns out she missed the meeting because her monster came back and she's dead.
What follows is Lynette running off half-cocked. The proverbial chicken with her head cut off while spouting conspiracy theories like a paranoid delusional. On one hand, Lynette is right - their group is in very real danger. The problem is she's half-crazed and wrong about so much else that nobody takes her seriously. This is a woman who has turned her apartment into a bunker (OK, understandable), keeps a pepper plant as a pet (seriously, she names it), and thinks she's so smart because she's always one step ahead, planning escape routes, staying off the grid as much as possible - but of course her security and walls are breached in short order.
The problem with this story is there's literally no one to root for. The secret to a good horror movie is that your Final Girl IS someone you can root for. The ordinary, everyday girl who thwarts a monster. These characters all did that, but they all left a bad taste in my mouth. Hell, even in Scream III when Sidney Prescott is living off the grid, she's answering phones for a women's crisis hotline. The one character in this group you could potentially root for is the character you never meet on page because she's the first to get killed off.
Hendrix also makes the choice to have many of the Final Girls in this story be survivors of events ripped straight from horror movies. I suspect this might have been done as a wink and nod to horror fans, but quite frankly (and this cannot be overstated) I found it lazy as hell. There's Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween. I'm pretty sure the Gnome movie was a rip-off of Leprechaun, and yes, there's even a Sidney Prescott wannabe and Scream rip-off - which, hand to God, Hendrix called Stab in this book. Yes, the same knock-off name they used in the Scream movie franchise when Neve Campbell's characters finds herself being played by Tori Spelling in the movie version.
I should have DNF'ed this early but stuck with it mainly because I had to see how it all played out in the end - and shockingly enough, I did like the ending. Unfortunately the ride to that ending was tedious and exhausting and there was just nothing there that worked for me. My New Year's Resolution? Stop getting suckered in by NetGalley promo emails.
Final Grade = D
3 comments:
"The one character in this group you could potentially root for is the character you never meet on page because she's the first to get killed off."
Welp!
(and oh, the tales I could tell you about the evils of the "read now for 72 hours!" promo emails! ::looking sadly at my ARCs TBR:: )
My New Year's Resolution is to be much more judicious with NetGally! Also, I'm determined to actually clear out long dormant ARCs from my TBR. It's shameful, truly.
Yes, every wink and nod you suspected is indeed a wink and nod with some heavy-handed "SEE WHAT I DID THERE HARHAR" attached to it. I've only read 1 thing by Grady Hendrix, which was "Paperbacks from Hell", his ode to original horror/sci fi paperback releases from the 70s and 80s. I enjoyed it a lot, but have never felt the yen to try his fiction. Sounds like a good bullet dodged!
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