Wow, final girls have really had a great summer! July saw the release of The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix (reviewed here), and with the very end of August, I see Stephen Graham Jones’ newest book, My Heart Is A Chainsaw, is being released. I have not had the opportunity to read that yet, but I highly recommend The Final Girls Support Group (on a side note, my daughter was delighted that the characters were getting therapy).

The final girl is the survivor who takes down the monster in slasher movies. When fiction touches on her, it’s usually in a meta sort of way. Here are a couple of titles to try out if you are in the mood for a tale about final girls.

Final Girls by Riley Sager follows Quincy Carpenter. the lone survivor of a massacre at a cabin in the woods ten years earlier. Quincy, along with two other girls, Lisa and Sam, who survived slasher-style massacres, were labeled “Final Girls” by the media.  She has done her best to move on, finding a boyfriend and starting a baking blog, but things start to fall apart when Lisa apparently dies from suicide, leaving a message on Quincy’s voicemail. Then Sam, who has been off the grid for years, appears at Quincy’s door and Quincy’s carefully constructed life starts to fall apart. The twist in this story was not what I expected it to be. Sager does a great job of deconstructing the final girl trope and this was a very difficult book to put down.

 Final Girls by Mira Grant introduces Esther Hoffman, a journalist determined to debunk proprietary virtual reality technology that situates participants in horror movie scenarios to force them to face their worst fears. The scientist in charge, Dr. Jennifer Webb, challenges Esther to try it out with her. Events out of their control result in the two of them being trapped in the virtual reality scenario together, with disturbing results.

Final Girl Pocket Manga vol. 1 by David Hutchison drops four girls in a seemingly abandoned, isolated town, where they are stalked by its residents, and must escape their nightmare situation. Only one of them can be the final girl, though… Readers voted for their choice of final girl, and a bloody, full color climax reveals the survivor.

 The Last Final Girl  is also by Stephen Graham Jones. Taking a . chance with an experimental format, he has written it in a screenplay format, following the structure of a slasher movie. His love of the genre is clear, with many references to existing movies and “in-jokes”. The structure and the dependence of the audience’s understanding of the text on comprehension mean this will appeal to a very niche audience, but that audience will love it. Graham has also written an amazing final girl in his last novel, The Only Good Indians. 

The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky starts us out with a final girl– Rachel Chavez, who was attacked in her home and survived. Rachel is a scholarship student at a fancy private school who starts out with no friends, until she discovers a secret club of horror lovers, The Mary Shelley Society, who create “fear tests”, horror scenarios that they try out on friends, classmates, and family. There’s no way this could end badly, right?