“You can’t change what’s happened. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.”

Quincy Carpenter is a Final Girl, the last one left standing after a horrific massacre. She’s one of 3 that have been dubbed by the media as ‘final girls’, but the world slowly forgets about her and the others as time creates distance. However, when someone starts killing final girls, and the only other surviving one shows up on her doorstep, Quincy’s carefully crafted life quickly gets turned upside down in the chase to find the killer and remember what truly happened on the night everything changed.

Final Girls was my first thriller by Riley Sager, and I went in knowing that while lots of people raved about this book, my close friends personally enjoyed his later works a lot more. So I always went in with the intention of reading his latter books anyways, even if this one didn’t do it for me. In the end, Final Girls does not rank highly at all on my list of favorite thrillers, though I can appreciate some of the things done in this novel in terms of writing, plotting, and reliability of the narrator.

First off, I always love an unreliable narrator. There’s just something intriguing about having to question every scene that’s given to you, every piece of information because it’s being filtered through this character who has loads of biases. In Final Girls, Quincy straight up doesn’t remember what happened the night of her massacre, and this fact combined with her being the final girl, as well as facts that come up as the story progresses, makes her extremely suspicious as a narrator. Sager really runs with this as well, and actively tries to strengthen the divide between narrator and reader through some well-placed memories, scenes, and reactions.

However, that was the only strong point of the novel for me. While I found the setting as well as plot ideas quite interesting and new, it was ruined by how exactly the story was told. Now, most thrillers and mysteries involve a lot of shifting of the finger-pointing, with the reader constantly shifting who they think did it. Final Girls does this, or tries to, but the execution failed for me. Everyone seemed equally suspicious, and when suspicion shifted, it did so hard and with almost complete certainty. There were so many times where almost no doubt was left behind that someone did it, and almost every theory you may have had based on subtle clues in the beginning seemed to be proven 100 times over by the time you got 70-80% done with the book. Then, it turns out the only person (literally, the only one) who was never questioned, never had fingers pointed at them, was the one who did it. Which is also an obvious twist even if I had never considered it. Now, this doesn’t sound all so bad, I was left surprised, I was left guessing, etc., but it was how dramatic and sure all these twists and turns seemed that made it not enjoyable. It just wasn’t subtle enough for me and seemed to remove the game of theorizing as time went on.

I also just did not like any of the characters, and while that’s often okay, it meant I literally did not care if everyone in the book was murdered by the killer, leaving me with no stakes in the game. I was reading it to find out who did it, but without the urgency of potentially losing more characters if it wasn’t solved fast enough. The dislike of the main character was heightened further by what happens in the lull of the mid-book moments. It’s scenes made entirely with Quincy and Sam that work to make both seem more suspicious, but it just feels like such a diversion from the main plot that I couldn’t even really care about what they were getting up to. I really could’ve done without that entire middle section.

All in all, I see a strong basis for future thrillers in Sager’s writing, but Final Girls just had too many flaws for me to fully enjoy.