⭐⭐⭐🐊🐊🐊

I feel that it is important to notate that I went into reading this book with two particular sets of bias. One is a love for the concept of final girls and the slasher trope in the horror genre, can you blame me? The other is a cautious attitude toward author Grady Hendrix. I have had many people DNF his various books for very valid reasons. In the end, I had already bought this book and wanted to give it a go anyway. 

I am weary to include this, but there are certain characteristics and behaviors of the women in this book that make me a little uneasy. And, if I’m being honest with myself, it is because the author is a cis white guy, and as a whole, I lean on the cautious side when they are writing about experiences that are not their own. None of these were major red flags to me personally, but it was worth mentioning. 

One thing that I didn’t love that was really pounded into me as a reader was that men are horrible. Like, a majority of moral conversations in the book are very man-hate dominated. I understand that it is commentary on how every man is capable of being incredibly dangerous, trust me, as a woman I understand that. But the way it is described in the book just feels like the author really wanted to emphasize that men are predators in a way that both glorifies the “danger” in men and panders towards surface level feminism. That all serial killers and slashers are men and could never be woman is both inaccurate and excludes trans and non-binary folk entirely. I love a good “throw the whole man” away joke, but this felt like something else. This felt like someone using satire incorrectly.

My last point of concern was that I both liked and disliked that the background of each final girl was ripped off from a major movie franchise that already exists in the real world. Except maybe that of the main character, I’m not familiar with her backstory as a real world series, but the others definitely were. On one hand, I liked the familiarity of those stories, on the other, I kind of just wish the author made entirely new slasher backstories. That would have been really engaging.

Anyway, after all is said and done, I give this three stars. It was fine and I didn’t find anything to be particularly offensive (to me), but some things were kind of done in bad taste. It gets three gaydar gators because one of the final girls IS a lesbian and we do meet their partner, but they aren’t front and center very often. Bonus for disability representation as one final girl is wheelchair bound, though she is not present through most of the book.

EDIT: Also, SPOILERS: I completely forgot about the relationship that Lynnette has with the cowboy, super gross, something bad should have happened to the cowboy. The fact that he's still seen in a positive light at the end of the book makes my skin kind of crawl.