Premise: The media labels female survivors of horrific massacres as Final Girls. Quincy, Sam and Lisa are different in every way except they each survived their own brush with death. When Lisa dies, Sam is unexpectedly impacted. When fellow survivor, Quincy, shows up out of the blue to shake up her world, Sam stills reliving things. Questioning things. Like why has Quincy shown up when she did? What secrets is she hiding? And how might they turn Sam’s world upside down?
What I Liked: Who doesn’t love the troupe of Final Girl? It’s the gender “f*ck you” sex politics. She will rise from the carnage, exhausted by the oppression she has suffered but determined to outwit, outlast and finally maim her oppressor.
So this delicious novel captures that spirit. And will give fans of slasher horror things to keep them foaming. There’s a mystery that
What I didn’t Like: Way to many flashbacks that change the use of the pronouns. Much of the story is told in first person voice, unless there’s a flash back. It switches to third person voice, which I found a tad lazy, because the flashback still was from the POV of the main protagonist.
The flashbacks went on and one, interspersed throughout the novel. It was a side story to the main story. Each time I thought the flashbacks were building to their ultimate point (pun intended), it stopped. It happened so often I wondered if we were ever going to get to the part fans of slashers wanted. As the flashbacks dragged on, the momentum of the main story took a back seat.
For a novel about the slasher film heroine, there wasn’t much slashing or killing happening.
I would’ve loved to see the story delve deeper into the psyche of the final girl and what made each of them so different. We didn’t really get that.
Verdict: It’s a still a good read over all. It’s not horrible by any means. It may not always provide some intense scares, but it slowly turns up the heat on the thriller and mystery you would even notice you’re boiling.