The Final Girl Support Group

Man, this thing was a wild ride. I got it earlier today and read it almost all in one go, only taking a short break for dinner. 

The premise is pretty simple. The slasher movies in this reality are based on true stories and the final girls of those stories are real people. It's decades later for most of them, so we're not talking teenage girls anymore, but older women. Six of them meet for a support therapy group, but right away, bad things start happening and it becomes clear that someone is after the final girls. 

This worked really well because the protagonist definitely felt like a final girl. Final girls aren't infallible. They make a shitload of mistakes and our main character does just that. She's not entirely likeable, but not one of these characters is. They're not unlikeable, but if you need an endearing cast to read a book, you're not going to find that here.

I loved the fast pace and the constant changes, plus the world-building with the parodies of actual slasher franchises. Like there are their own versions of Jason and Freddy and Leatherface. My biggest problem is the ambiguity regarding the "Dream King," which is the Nightmare on Elm Street parody. It feels like there's a lot more story there and it's never explained what exactly happened to that character in the past. It's the one that has more of a supernatural element to it and it doesn't quite fit in with the reality of the rest of the book, especially one scene at the end. But that's a fairly minor nitpick. 

If you like horror at all, I highly recommend checking this out. I'd call it a thriller novel, not horror, but the plot's basis is from horror movies, so there's crossover.