The Final Girl Support Group

For decades, a handful of women have carried a brutal kind of fame: each is the lone survivor of a slasher killing spree, the "final girl" whose ordeal was later spun into blockbuster horror films. Once a month they gather in a quiet Los Angeles room with their therapist, trading coping strategies and old grievances, trying to build something like ordinary lives on top of the worst nights of their existence.

Lynnette Tarkington has spent years turning survival into a discipline — fortified apartment, escape routes, a rigid routine that keeps the past locked out. But when one of the group is targeted and the careful boundaries between the women begin to collapse, Lynnette becomes convinced that someone has decided the final girls were never meant to make it out at all. The trouble is, after a lifetime of being told she's paranoid, no one wants to believe her.

What follows is a tense, propulsive chase through a world obsessed with the monsters that hunted these women — and far less interested in the women themselves. Grady Hendrix turns the clichés of the slasher genre inside out, asking what happens to the people who outlive the body count, and whether surviving once is enough to survive again.

First published in 2021.