The Final Girl Support Group

De: Grady Hendrix

Narrado por: Adrienne King

The Instant New York Times Best Seller

A Good Morning America Buzz Pick

“The horror master...puts his unique spin on slasher movie tropes.” (USA Today)

A can't-miss summer read, selected by The New York Times, Oprah Daily, Time, USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN, LitHub, BookRiot, Bustle, Popsugar, and the New York Public Library

In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives...but what happens after?

Like his best-selling novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix’s latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films - movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized - someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

©2021 Grady Hendrix (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“The Final Girl Support Group sizzles with action, originality, and a gleaming concept sharp as a scalpel.” (Charlaine Harris, number one New York Times best-selling author)

“A great read…[Hendrix] excels at writing horror humor.... His characters are funny and real, though at least one will definitely lose a limb at some point.... Though the final girls’ plight has all the scares of great horror fiction, there is an element of truth in their situation that will be recognizable to anyone who has experienced real trauma.” (The New York Times)

“A wildly entertaining romp through the conventions of horror’s slasher film subgenre.... Hendrix masterfully evokes the paranoid existences of his diverse cast in the aftermath of their traumatic ordeals, and he so explicitly details the massacres and fictional film sagas that grew out of them that readers may believe them to be real. The result is a wonderfully suspenseful and darkly comic novel that cleverly subverts popular culture. Horror fans will be wowed.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

My ears

The narrator’s voice was like nails on a chalkboard terrible . I had a hard time finishing it. Story was enjoyable.

Great book for everyone, not just fans of horror.

The concept of The Final Girl Support Group is phenomenal and managed to turn a tired genre into something fresh and new. The "final girls," the real life lone female survivors of mass murder that major horror movie franchises were based on, are growing older now. No longer fresh faced teenage virgins, they are struggling to make it on their own in the world. Some are doing fairly well, others can barely leave their barricaded fortresses even for food. But all go out once a month, no matter what, to The Final Girl Support Group that they've been attending with each other for the past 16 years. But the group is losing its cohesion, and members are threatening to drop out. They're all frustrated with trying to live in a society that refuses to see them as anything other than objects of morbid curiosity. But for some "Superfans" that curiosity has crossed the line into obsession. The morning one of the Girls is found murdered, the rest realize their brutal fight for survival is starting all over again.

I was a bit concerned that I wouldn't be able to follow along in the book because I'm not a huge fan of slasher movies, and I don't like the multi-sequel franchise movies in particular. But I absolutely LOVED Grady Hendrix's book Horrorstor, so I decided to give this one a shot. The good news is that the plotlines of the movies are merely the characters' backstories. They aren't even always the true backstory because Hollywood has obviously taken massive liberties with them. Hendrix explains everything you need to understand everything and everyone in the book, even if you haven't seen a single horror film.

The Final Girl Support Group is a deceptively rich novel. Hendrix fully fleshes out these women in all their flawed glory and really nails the complicated dynamics of Sisterhood. He also tackles PTSD, and very compassionately shows how difficult it is for some people to create a future for themselves after their lives get shattered. Just how do you go on when you don't really want to? What do we owe to those who help us survive, and what do we owe to those whom we weren't able to save? Is dying really the worst thing that can happen to a person? The utter unfairness of life gets touched on several.times, as do all the many forms of betrayal friends can inflict on one another. All this while the plot races on without a pause, and goes through every twist and turn imaginable!

I only have two complaints with this book. The first is the incredibly slow pace of the narrator. Fortunately Audible lets the listener change the speed of the narration or I don't think I would have made it through the book! But once I sped it up it was fine. The other difficulty I had was that each chapter starts with a newspaper clipping or police interview notes, or a journal entry or something along those lines. In the written book it's easy to see these notes are not part of the ongoing narrative because they're in different fonts, etc. But in an audio version it isn't too easy to figure that out, especially when the chapter number and title are read AFTER the clipping. It took a while to figure out what was going on, because when read out loud, there is no break between the story and some completely unrelated snippet of info from 20 years ago. If the narrator had read the chapter number and title first it would have been a huge help.

I was so confused at first

the first part of this audiobook was kinda slow and weird. I'm very glad I didn't give up on it bc it was great once it started to all click and come together. Great narrator and twists.

Ok story - not a fan of narration

I was looking forward to The Final Girl Support Group all year. To say my expectations were high after such a long wait is a gross understatement. The reading experience was definitely entertaining with its mystery/thriller & suspense, but it was also confusing in my opinion and took me a good minute to get going. And unfortunately, I was not a fan of the audiobook narration. While this isn't horror, it does provide some nostalgia of old slasher film cinema, and as always, it's a fine cure for rainy day boredom.

Fun book!

This unique novel provides engaging characters and a twist-and-turn story. just when you think you have it figured out, you don't! Reading of the novel is very well done and makes the characters come alive. Don't pass this up!

Needs better narrator

So the overall story I really liked, however due to the narrator I think I would’ve preferred to read this one. The narrators voice comes off like a perpetually nervous person in their 60’s reading a scary story to children. Her voice constantly does this like shaky nervous thing that I can’t stand. I feel like this one needs a redo for the voice acting, but otherwise very good book.

I almost gave up a few times, but glad I hung in

I picked this book because I really liked The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. I almost gave up on it a few times during the first half of the book not because of the reader, but because of the pace of the story. I'm glad I hung in there, though because it picked up quite a bit and I really enjoyed the ending.

Very unique and fun.

This book is a fun adventure of Final Girls. Very cool idea to have these final girls actualIy know one another and try to pick up the pieces. My only small gripe is the woman who reads this. It might be just me but her voice. I find it distracting and not a good fit. I think the book overall is good and I may buy a hard copy to enjoy it even more.

Love love LOVE the story

I read The Final Girls Support Group and loved it so much I wanted to listen to it because I didn’t have time to sit down and read it again, but the performance turned me off so much. Ugh. Read the book. Don’t listen to the audio book.

Great book! Not great narration

I’ve listened to the stack of awesome books in the Audible Plus offerings by Grady Hendrix and loved them all. For plot, character, and suspense, I think this one is the best, so it deserves its recent fame. I guessed some of the plot twists but not at all in a “ho-hum-I-saw-THAT-coming” way - more like “am I right? Am I? Who’s really the bad guy??” Playing with tropes and still keeping me on the edge of my seat takes a LOT, but this book delivered!!

However. As other reviewers have said, the narration didn’t do the book justice. I almost never change the speed of books, preferring to hear the narration as directed, so when I have to speed it up, that’s a bad sign - and I definitely had to do that on this book. Marilyn’s drawl made her almost unintelligible (and I am FROM Texas, like Marilyn!) - but worse, something about the way the narrator emphasized and over-emphasized words so often, and especially for the first person narration of Lynette… made her sound almost like a toddler or melodramatic pre-teen. And stupid. It made her sound stupid. And sure, she is not a rocket scientist or anything, and sure she makes mistakes, but… I was constantly resisting the narrator’s portrayal and wishing I had read the print edition so my own imagination could have come up with a voice for Lynette. It would not have sounded like this. I’m not saying the narrator isn’t any good and would at least try other works she reads, because clearly the portrayal was an artistic or directorial decision - but it was a decision I did not like at all.

It’s still easily worth a credit! - but think about reading it in pop to t if you’re really excited about this one - and you should be excited! 😁