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The Final Girl by Wol-vriey

Burning Bulb Publishing, 2020

ISBN: 9781948278263

Available: paperback, Kindle

Wol-vriey’s prior novel, The Virgin, previously reviewed here, was a hit with his fans, and left them clamoring for a sequel.  Ask, and ye shall receive: The Final Girl was a game show alluded to in The Virgin.  Thankfully, the Nigerian splat-master listened to the fans, took the idea and turned it into its own book.  It’s chock-full of what his readers love and expect: a fast-paced story with creativity, gore, and twisted humor.  It has everything that made the prior novel such a good read, the main difference being this one will appeal to a broader audience, due to the non-existence of rape and graphic sex in the book.

Like its predecessor, The Final Girl revolves around a reality show broadcast on the dark web, and available for viewing to anyone willing to pony up the dough.  It stars eight women contestants placed in an underground mock-up town. A sum of 24 million dollars is hidden somewhere in the town.  All the ladies have to do is find it and avoid getting killed by the monsters that populate the town.  The catch?  There can be only one woman alive at the end, so the contestants have plenty of motivation to kill each other, as well as the monsters.  After the starting bell goes off to open the show, mayhem ensues.

As expected, The Final Girl is another runaway train of a novel, most readers will burn through its 190 pages in a sitting or two.    The creativity shown with the monsters in the book is one of the highlights.  They aren’t made up monsters per se, but instead, they are made from human corpses, stitched together and re-animated by a company that has mastered genetic engineering.  Example: the human centipede, made from a bunch of human torsos sewn together in sections, with arms for legs, and a human head on each end.  Kids aren’t spared here either; there are also children’s bodies with flippers added, turning them into homicidal fish-babies that populate the lake in the center of town.  These creatures are mean and scary enough to give the gun-toting contestants all they can handle.

As for the contestants, they are fleshed out better than the last story, well enough the reader will actually be cheering for some of them, and despising others.  The pious little Muslim girl, Fatima, is a genuine charmer who is almost impossible to dislike.  On the other end, you have the identical (and identically brain-dead) twins Cherry and Berry, who are easy to dislike and root against.  Their annoying habit of always finishing each other’s sentences contributes greatly to their aggravation factor.  A dysfunctional mother-stepdaughter team, a cop, a nurse, and a hooker round out the rest of the characters, but be prepared for some surprises, as not all the characters are what they seem.  The one uniting factor is these ladies are no wimps; they can dish it out as well as any Western gunslingers when survival is on the line, as long as they have enough ammunition.

Combine the above with the author’s usual fast-paced style of writing and splat, and you’ve got a winner of a story. The Final Girl does have broader appeal than his usual work.  A weak spot in Wol-vriey’s writing has always been the frequent, graphic sex, that never really seemed to contribute to the story.  This time, there isn’t ANY sex in the book, although there is a rape threat, which never materializes.  By removing this element, Wol-vriey trimmed the last bit of fat off his writing, leaving a pure, stripped-down thriller of a horror novel.  Fans of Jack Ketchum and Brian Keene should devour this book, and for people looking at reading splat writing for the first time, this is a great place to start.  It’s the closest the author has come to writing a book with mass market appeal, and it’s his best yet.  Highly recommended.

Contains: violence, extreme gore, profanity, drug use, body horror

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson