Review: "Final Girls," by Riley Sager
One of my favourite reads of the year!
"...Before the Fall meets The Strangers..."
I think this book is perfect for fans of Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. It's got a very similar feel to it, but it adds an element of the horror genre on top. It's Before the Fall meets The Strangers film. The jacket cover is bold, which is why I picked the book up in the first place. The premise is juicy which is why I bought it. Icing on the cake was Stephen King's endorsement. Quincy endures the unimaginable and manages to escape with the scars as a constant reminder of the horror of that night. And in escaping, she joins a small group of woman known publicly as "Final Girls." I personally have never heard this term before (perhaps it's more popular in the US?), or perhaps it was simply a good opportunity to use "Girl" in the title, which seems to be a trend these days. This book is paced well, and it jumps back and forth between present action and past action. I felt that Sager did this well and made it easy to follow. I've lost count of the number of books that change timelines without giving you a heads up and it confuses the hell out of the reader. But the chapters are shortish, and you are forewarned at the beginning of a chapter if you're going back in time. Simple, but effective. This book was well written. It was detailed enough that the words became living things in my mind, moving images. It felt like watching a movie. I could hear the sounds and smell the smells. Always a good thing. What I enjoyed about it was the horror aspect of it. Sager doesn't overdo the gore, but it's enough to give the book some real bite. Tastefully done, if you will. In this way, it reminded me of The Strangers (one of my all time favourite horror flicks). This book drew many similarities to Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. It looks at soul survivors and what happens to them in the aftermath. It examines them under media scrutiny. It shows how easily the public holds survivors on pedestals even when they don't ask for it, or even want it. As a result, we often see the dramatic and unfortunate results of being held to a standard you never asked for. Often survivors can't cope with the fame, they crave anonymity again. Final Girls isn't without it's genre clichés. But that's to be expected. We have a strong female character who survives a massacre. But we then give her a gaping hole in her memory (rolls eyes) so that the reader is left in the dark until the very end, when, miraculously, her memory comes back to her at precisely the moment she needs it to! In defence of this, Quincy (MC) experienced something horrifying enough that a memory gap is perfectly normal, and it's probably the only reason I didn't actually roll my eyes. Then we toss into the mix another mysterious character who has changed her name recently and shows up on Quincy's doorstep out of nowhere. Oh, and also....okay I won't go on, you get the point. I will say that the ending was both a surprise to me, yet also unsurprising in some ways. Sager did a good enough job of keeping me second guessing myself enough throughout the story that I was never fully sure who was good and who was bad. I had my inkling, throughout, and ultimately I was right, but it wasn't without a few decent twists and turns (especially right at the end) to throw me off. The characters were developed well. I felt that perhaps Quincy was too quick to trust Sam, but oh well. I thought Jeff was a believable boyfriend to Quincy. I was sort of rooting for him, because I can understand how frustrating it would have been to be with Quincy, someone who has a past that she isn't willing to speak about. It would have been equally frustrating when she suddenly lets Sam right into their lives (and home). Poor Jeff. The ending (by which I mean the very last two or three pages after the climax) was warm and fuzzy. I half expected (and sort of wanted) a creepy and salacious twist at the end to make my jaw drop, but it wasn't mean to be. Alas, now I'm just being picky. A great read, you won't regret picking it up!
