WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW
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| “I think she's going to say something about Him. Most likely because of the nightmare, which lingers sticky on my skin like drying perspiration. I brace myself to hear her tell me that He's resurfaced, as I always knew He would. It doesn't matter that He's dead. That I gladly watched Him die.”- Final Girls, Riley Sager |
Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet.
Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.
That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.
Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.
That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.
I finally read Final Girls, 2017's hottest thriller. I have been wanting to read it for the longest time, but every time I went to the library, it was out. And now, almost a full year since it came out, I finally got my hands on a copy. Was it worth the wait?
Well...
Just general thriller writing 101- maybe try and make it so one doesn't guess exactly who did it in the first ten pages? Now, I'm sure this premature guessing doesn't bother some people, but it bothers the hell out of me. I shouldn't be able to make snap guesses like that, Sager! Let me hang on my line a little longer!
Admittedly, this may just have to do with the fact that I read a lot of thrillers and have been so well-acquainted with the usual twists and turns of this genre that I can smell a twist coming from 100 pages away. I can't remember the last time a mystery shocked me and that's why lately I've been gravitating towards thrillers that are less whodunnit and are more character studies than anything else. As Final Girls is very much your typical adult "psychological" thriller, along the same lines as The Perfect Stranger, it's not really the kind of thing that's been speaking to me lately.
Speaking of The Perfect Stranger, this novel reminded me a lot of that one. Both deal with characters with dark pasts and, in both books, a strange girl with a closet full of corpses comes into their lives. And in both, very little happens until the end.
Seriously. When I read a thriller that isn't written by Tana French, it better be tense and those bodies better rack up real fast. Or it should be disturbing and psychological. This book is neither of those. In fact, if it was a slasher flick I would probably have turned it off by now, disappointed, and I don't even like slasher flicks. How the heck did Sager write a book inspired by the formulaic plots of violent movies and make it so vanilla? Here at Bookworm Basics, we have a loose idea as to what horror is (defined as anything with Gothic or disturbing elements) and I wouldn't even put this book under that category.
I mean, in Sager's favor, he's managed to ape that female contemporary thriller style so well, I had no idea that he was a man until I went on Goodreads. Dude picked the right pen name- he'd blend right in with all the vaguely masculine leaning gender neutral names that women writers chose because they are worried about losing the .5 of the male population that might even think about picking up a novel about a woman whose murdered neighbor was having an affair with her husband (who could it have been?).
So yeah, Final Girls. I like the idea behind it- of course, otherwise I wouldn't have picked it up. But it just did not suck me in the way thrillers should, and that makes me disappointed. I probably will read his second book, but I'm not going to look forward to it.
5.5 out of 10
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