In my attempts to get into the season's readings this month, I ventured over to the spookier side of my TBR, with a special thriller I've been anticipating all year... unfortunately, the results were frightfully disappointing. While I'm still scaring up a few last minute favorites to fill my haunting hours, here's why this recent release left me feeling gravely underwhelmed.
Final Girls, by Riley Sager, finds its heroine standing in a culturally significant space: at the violent ends of horror flicks, as the last ladies left alive to tell the tale... only, in this novel, the massacres that breed these fierce survivors are all too real. There's Lisa, who somehow escaped after a madman claimed the lives of nine of her sorority sisters; there's Sam, who outmaneuvered the Sack Man, during a harrowing graveyard shift at the Nightlight Inn; and there's Quincy, the sole survivor of a horrifying night in a cabin in the woods, at a college party gone terrifyingly wrong.
Quincy, however, has tried her best to put the title behind her. She's a baking blogger in New York City, living in an apartment financed by the extreme legal fallout after her attack, desperately hoping that her carefully-manicured image makes up for a young adulthood spent in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. However, that perfect tableau falls apart with the news that Lisa has been found dead, especially once Sam shows up on her doorstep. After all that these women have been through... could it be that someone still wants them dead?
With a blurb that promised an intriguing mystery, and a title featuring a favorite cinematic tropes, this book was set up to be one of my most anticipated of the year. It had a Stephen King promo on the front! When I had the chance to buy only five books when celebrating my bloggoversary, interrupting an otherwise year-long buying ban, this novel was one of the chosen few that made the cut!
Unfortunately, all this hype set it up so that when the main characterizations fell flat, motivations got murky, and action escalated at an uneven pace, it made it all the more disappointing.
In fact, I only made it about 50 pages in before I told my Dad, "This is actually turning out to be kind of a bummer." I had all the information I needed, in order to get a read on my current reading: the book lacked any kind of cinematic quality - a definite issue, once you consider the distinctly cinematic nature of its title and concept - our main character was unrelatable, and frankly unlikable, too, and none of the backgrounds given for the leading characters were especially believable or interesting.
And the pacing was uneven. It didn't just gap in places, it yawned, especially in between Quincy's current timeline, versus flashbacks to the night of the carnage at Pine Cottage. Not to mention that by certain contrivances of the plot, by the time you get the full story on the murders, you don't really get the impression Quincy necessarily deserved to be a Final Girl; it kind of seems like she survived on a fluke. Even before you reach that particular plot apex, suspense is built through attempts to construct her as an unreliable narrator, but those fell extremely flat, as well, as amnesia-centered-plot lines tend to do.
So with plot development, our main heroine, and a key conceptual literary device, all lacking luster, I had one thing on my mind: this cannot be this author's home genre.
And the pacing was uneven. It didn't just gap in places, it yawned, especially in between Quincy's current timeline, versus flashbacks to the night of the carnage at Pine Cottage. Not to mention that by certain contrivances of the plot, by the time you get the full story on the murders, you don't really get the impression Quincy necessarily deserved to be a Final Girl; it kind of seems like she survived on a fluke. Even before you reach that particular plot apex, suspense is built through attempts to construct her as an unreliable narrator, but those fell extremely flat, as well, as amnesia-centered-plot lines tend to do.
So with plot development, our main heroine, and a key conceptual literary device, all lacking luster, I had one thing on my mind: this cannot be this author's home genre.
You see, the notes in the back of the novel mention that "Riley Sager" is actually a pseudonym, covering for an already established author. My immediate bets arranged themselves towards the romance or chick-lit genres, or maybe even a contemporary YA author, because that's the only way I found myself able to justify the strange characterizations or lack of standard Horror or Thriller background demonstrated in this novel.
Internet exploration quickly led me to the author's real name: Todd Ritter, who deals in Crime Fiction. Unfortunately, this clarified nothing for me.
For someone whose main series centers around a female detective, it was strange that none of the police characters in Final Girls demonstrated much agency or aptitude beyond their two-dimensional renderings. I also have a lot of questions as to why he would elect to use a deliberately gender-neutral pseudonym for a genre that's a kissing cousin to the one in which he already writes, in order to somehow lend credence to the belief that the author of this book was female.
Internet exploration quickly led me to the author's real name: Todd Ritter, who deals in Crime Fiction. Unfortunately, this clarified nothing for me.
For someone whose main series centers around a female detective, it was strange that none of the police characters in Final Girls demonstrated much agency or aptitude beyond their two-dimensional renderings. I also have a lot of questions as to why he would elect to use a deliberately gender-neutral pseudonym for a genre that's a kissing cousin to the one in which he already writes, in order to somehow lend credence to the belief that the author of this book was female.
In the end, perhaps the book's greatest downfall, in my view, is due to its reliance on the cultural collateral typically ascribed to a Final Girl, when those aren't the only variables in a horror story necessary to creating a compelling plot: it's not just Nancy, it's Freddy. It's not just Laurie, it's Michael. It's not just Sydney, it's the numerous men (and women) behind the Ghostface mask. To create a compelling and powerful Final Girl, you need to experience the horror of what she's up against firsthand.
So with a story line that focuses on deliberately obscuring that fact until the last possible moment, you're holding back on a very important function of what it actually means to be a Final Girl. By not examining the backgrounds of the killers that led to the formation of these other women, a disservice is does to the complexity of their characters. As a result, everything just feels uneven: we're told we should root for Quincy - as not only the titular Final Girl, but as a lead character - but are never given complex or significant reasons to do so.
Final Verdict: While this dead read may have been one of my biggest letdowns of my reading year, it did help me cross the finish line for my Goodreads Challenge of 2017, just in time for NaNoWriMo! Plus, there's plenty of leftover Kit Kat bars to help numb the pain...
Who's your favorite Final Girl? What are you reading this Halloween? Let me know, in the comments below!
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