Fantastic slasher novel that plays out like a movie in your mind’s eye.

I loved every page of this one.

Final Girls: the ones who fight back against the monsters and emerge bloodied up but victorious. Six final girls become like sisters, meeting for over 10 years at The Final Girl Support Group with their shared therapist. Then one day, one of them goes missing. Another of them announces that she’s done with the group. Things spiral out of control, and the next thing you know- it’s a fight for your life and the lives of your sisters.


This book didn’t have any stale parts for me. It was constantly moving to the next outrageous scene/reveal. In true slasher fashion, there are parts that will make you laugh out loud and parts that will be so outrageous, your eyes will go big and you’ll wonder if there actually might be something wrong with you for enjoying something so gruesome. My only criticism is I had a bit of a hard time keeping all of the final girls & their individual stories straight. Otherwise, this one is solidly horrendous (in the best way).

4.5 ⭐️

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

'Final girl' is a pop-culture reference to the last survivor in a slasher film, usually a young woman who has proven her ability to keep fighting in the face of terror. In the Final Girl Support Group, Hendrix has imagined a sort of alternative reality, in which our favorite slasher films, cleverly retitled, are movies based on real-life crimes that each of the characters have endured. Now, these women lean on each other for support and comfort, until it appears that someone is targeting them, one by one. With sly humor, references to '80's horror films, and some sharp insight into why we continue to make these films, FGSG is one of my favorite reads of the year. Perfect for fans of horror movies, or even anyone familiar with the slasher flick genre.

I LOVED this book! The mix of classic slasher movies and true crime was done amazingly and I've already recommended this book to my friends and coworkers.

This book was bananas. Like I thought several times it couldn't get any crazier....but it does, it goes there several times.
This whole book is taken on the trope of the classic 'Final Girl', the last girl left standing at the end of a horror movie. What is her life like after those horrific events happened to her? We follow one main final girl in this book, Lynnette who has become paranoid ( with good reason) and never leaves her house only to go to Final Girls support group where she meets up with her fellow other Final Girls.
Someone is now killing off all the Final Girls and Lynn is the only one who is trying to figure out who. This book features all the classics; Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream and so many more. It's bloody and gory and will most def frighten you but gah what an intense ride.

Another knockout book by Grady Hendrix. This book kept me reading long into the night and it also kept me guessing until the very end. I'm not sure I could say that I LIKED any of the characters, but I definitely felt for them and was rooting for their survival. A must read for any fan of final girls.

3 star review coming to scariesthings.com
I love Grady Hendrix books but I just didn't connect with this one as much as I usually do. I think it is because I never formed a relationship with the characters. I still enjoyed it but not as much as I had hoped to

I will always jump at the chance to read a new Grady Hendrix novel. While they all have an element of horror and suspense, what I love about his writing is that each story is completely different and I never know what to expect. In this horror novel, Lynnette Tarkington is a Final Girl – she is the sole survivor of a massacre that occurred twenty years prior. But she’s not alone in her status. In fact, there are enough Final Girls to fill a support group that she has been devoutly attending over the past ten years. These women are the only ones who understand one another and what it means to be a survivor. They’ve been hounded by the media and horror-obsessed fans. When a Final Girl misses her meeting, Lynette’s worst fears are realized. Just because they survived once doesn’t guarantee the unthinkable won’t happen again. This book is a page-turning, adrenaline rush of a novel and I couldn’t put it down. It’s scary and, in parts, really funny. Hendrix is always inventive with his storytelling and fans of the Scream movies will absolutely slash through this novel. Thank you to Berkley Books and Netgalley for the advanced review copy.

The premise for this book alone is pretty clever, and I appreciate the sensitivity. The idea of a long-term survivorship program for the "Final Girls" in slasher movies brings to light a difficult topic that those movies ignore: the trauma that so many women carry around. Slasher movies love to celebrate women's strength and cunning by making them survivors, but are unconcerned with the burden they have to carry, or how society views female survivors. That is partly what made this book so frustrating for me. It's premise is so good, I was always ratcheting up my expectations only to feel like it wasn't hitting that potential. Its satire feels blunt instead of sharp, where it really take the jugular to how spectacles of violence against women in media are used and the women affected discarded. And it gestured at those points, but had little that truly bites or radically changes the way you view your own life.

This kind of post-modern horror - hyper-aware of tropes in movies and attempting to play around with them - is starting to wear thin on me. It began with the Scream movies and around the time of Cabin in the Woods it was starting to run on fumes. Taking the seams and outlines of other plots of horror movies... like it's not bad, but it's no longer a brilliant idea in and of itself. I think this needed to try a little harder. Nevertheless, I'd still recommend it to someone who's a big fan of the slasher genre or loves post-modern horror.

Hendrix's take on the concept of finals girls in the modern day is brutal, interesting, and honest. This was a page turner and a quick read.

This was spooky, terrifying and so timely. I read this when the new Handmaid's Tale season came out and wow, some of the parallel themes really opened my eyes...

Oh man this was such great take on the 80’s slasher horror genre and how to give it a real human element and answering the question of what happens after the movie to the final girl. How does she live a normal life when the most horrific thing that could happen to you happens when you are 16 and how to you move on and don’t turn into a shut-in. We have all these final girls whose cases in the 80’s was then used as inspiration for all the classic franchises that made 80’s horror amazing. I love how Grady took all the major franchises like Friday 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silent Night, Deadly Night and gave them real victims and showed how messed up they still are by what happened to them and how they have learned to cope with infamy and selling their story to make money. And that some of their killers are still behind bars while some are dead and there is only a small group of final girls left. You really feel for these victims and the text is broken up with news articles, case interviews and excerpts from books written about the cases or the women and how exploitative the genre was with its violence against women. It explores what the women do when one of them is murdered by the nephew of the original killer and realize that someone is after all the final girls. So just really well done and I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Thanks to Berkley and Netgalley for the complimentary copy of this book in e-book form. All opinions in this review are my own.

What happens when the movie credits roll? What happens in the aftermath to that final survivor? To that final girl?

Lynette is a member of an exclusive support group headed by psychologist Dr. Carol. All the members of the support group are final girls, or the girl who is the only survivor in a horrible tragedy that spawns horror film franchises. However, when a final girl ends up dead, it becomes obvious to Lynnette that the remaining final girls are being hunted down. Who is stalking them? Who wants them to pay? Why are they coming after them now? Doesn’t matter, because the final girls never give up. Too bad the killer didn’t know that.

This is the first book of Grady Hendrix’s I have read, but it won’t be the last. Part horror, part thriller, The Final Girls Support Group will send readers on a wild-ride full of twists and turns. I found the concept of “what happens after” to be compelling. What happens after the story ends? What happens to the survivors? I thought it was interesting how the author explored this concept, and it created a great backdrop for the book.

Lynnette was a complex character. Readers will love her at times, and will hate her at others. Every time she made a stupid decision, or did something that made me cringe, I reminded myself of the tragedy she survived. In the end though, I think readers will be happy with Lynnette as a MC, and will appreciate her growth throughout the story.

This book is not for the faint of heart. Yes, it is part thriller but make no mistake, this is a horror book at its core. Moreover, the MCs are final girls for a reason. Some of the events these women have lived through are harsh, and while I don’t think the author goes into unnecessary detail, there is some gory details. Using the CG scale, where 1 is reading a book and having no reaction and 10 is hanging over the toilet like a crippled goose, I would put this book at a solid 7.5.

This book is perfect for any fan of 80s slasher flicks or Riley Sager’s Final Girls. Readers should preparre for a wild ride. 4.25 stars.

I received a free digital ARC from NetGalley and Berkley in exchange for an honest review.

FINAL GIRLS. I first heard this term a few years ago and it always intrigued me. I love Grady Hendrix so I was doubly excited to read this book. I really enjoyed it!

Lynette is a part of a special support group for Final Girls - girls who, mostly in the 80s, not only escaped the deranged lunatic serial killer but fought him off and were the last woman standing... except that the deranged lunatic serial killer also lived. They're all looking over their shoulders for the day he'll come back a second (or third or fourth, for some girls) time. Lynette ... is a different than the others, though. She lives her live looking over her right shoulder, then her left shoulder, then up ahead and AHA! back again, doubling back to make sure she didn't miss anything, swopping into the alleyway to see if anyone passes her twice, etc etc. She leaves her apartment to go to group (Final Girl Support Group, that is) once a month and not much else. Her apartment is high enough to be safe from intruders but low enough for her to jump from a window if need be, and even has a high tech security cage once you enter it, so that no one can sneak up on her.

On the day that sets the story going, one of the girls in group (Adrienne) doesn't show up, and it's news that there's been more killings at the same camp where Adrienne became a Final Girl. We learn about a new Final Girl, Stephanie, who Lynette feels a compulsion to protect. We follow Lynette as she makes more and more crazy decisions, all based on her fear that their killers are hunting for them, that there's a conspiracy against all the Final Girls in play, and that it's her duty to protect everyone.

I enjoyed the story and Lynette, even when she exasperated me and when I wasn't sure if I could trust her or not. She's sure of a conspiracy against her and the other girls, and no one believes her, leading her to make more and more moves that paint her as the crazy PTSD girl. But will those moves turn out to be necessary in the end?!

I liked reading all the different ways that Lynette thinks about her safety on a day to day basis. "One is none, and two is one." I feel bad saying this, but I was craving a little more gore and horror from the backstories of the girls. Maybe I'd be the horrible fangirl the book tells us about if these girls were real life, but I wanted more, damnit! We had a Scream-a-like, a Halloween-a-like, a Friday the 13th-a-like, and I'm forgetting the others because I needed more.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. I think it was a great premise and well-written. I do want to say that at first I thought the premise was exactly like Riley Sager's Final Girls, but Hendrix does something much more interesting by having all of the final girls be friends with each other, moreso group therapy confidantes than friends, but still it made this book all the more interesting.

I liked Lynette at first, but with each detail we learn about her past it made her slightly less likeable.

I understand this is meant to be a mystery/thriller, but many times the author buried the lead in giving us the final girls' back stories or detailing their trauma they went through. Many times the author would just mention a killer's name as if the audience was supposed to know who it was. Other times the back stories for the women were given through newspaper clippings, scripts from interviews, or paragraphs from criticism of slasher movies. I also felt there were two or three more final girls than necessary. and it was a bit difficult to keep track of everyone.

Despite the above, I truly could not put this down. This kept me guessing until the very end. It was a slow build, and then once the middle hit, it was a race for me to finish. The killer/killers were truly surprising, although I wish there was a bit more motive on their ends, but I guess deranged individuals that decide to go on a mass killing spree are less rational beings than others.

Thank you netgalley for giving me an e-galley in exchange for my honest review. This was dark and funny like Grady Hendrix books are. I love the horror movie tropes, and guessing which final girl goes with which classic slasher movie. But this book and this author is so smart, the layers that are added, with just the short newspaper and magazine clippings elevate it to another level, taking it to a treatise on feminist culture, without losing the horror. I will read everything Grady Hendrix writes.

A final girl. The last girl standing after a brutal, horrific slaughter. The girl who takes out the killer. So what happens when a group of "final girls" meet together years after the separate traumatizing events that brought them together? And what do they do when they discover there's a new type of killer-one that hunts final girls.

Well, that was one wild ride! I honestly didn't anticipate all the twists and turns this book took. Some of the dark humor rubbed me the wrong way and there was a handful of moments that just felt so over the top (the run-in at the "crazy" cabin in the woods). But overall this was highly readable considering the fact that I finished it in 3 days! A fun, twisty, darkly humorous thriller that shocks and appalls!

I haven't read the Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires but I saw it around bookish spaces last year. Everyone seemed to enjoy it so I took a chance and requested the author's latest book. I thought a change of pace with a "Final Girl" book would be good since I love "Good for her!" stories. However, I didn't expect the characters to be old? I honestly thought they'd be, at most, in their mid-30s. I just couldn't relate to the older people vibe. When reading, I realized the characters are more Laurie Strode in Halloween 2018 than the original one. This is a case of "not for me," so others might like it.

I requested this ARC because I enjoyed Grady Hendrix's Horrorstor and was in the mood for something in this genre. I was blown away! I cannot say enough about the tone of the book being spot on and how much I appreciated the age of the characters. So often in "final girl" novels the character(s) are beautiful traumatized women in their early 20's, but here they are mature middle aged women! I loved the deep character building Hendrix provided for each character, not just Lynnette, and especailly appreciated the diversity of the cast. The extra layer that each "final girl" was also the survivor of a sequel gave the novel even of dark dry humor. Spree killing is not funny, but it can be ironic. Crazy Chrissy and public's focus on murderabilia grounded the book and gave it a social focus, why is the public so fixated on muder? Why do they glorify the murderers? Why do they monitize the victims and the survivors? The plot twists were great and Lynnette's paranoia ad second guessing lead the reading down sevearl wrong paths, but eventually ended in a satisifying truth. I highly recommend this book to fans of horror, domestic drama, psycholocial thrillers and true crime (even though it isn't true).

This was a fun, exciting ride of a novel that humanizes the eponymous final girls beautifully. Grady Hendrix takes one of horror's most beloved tropes -- the final girl -- and challenges readers to view them a real. broken, flawed women while weaving an intricate plot full of action and slaughter.

as a slasher film enthusiast this was really fun, i liked that each character had a final girl story that was basically a classic slasher girl film but just a bit more realistic. i think the only thing was that the story felt a little long around the 60%-70% mark and a lot of that chunk could be taken out because it felt really long and i just feel like a lot of it wasn’t needed. this book was super fun tho like i said, i have to go back and read his book from last year and i definitely can’t wait to see what he does this year