This book was okay. I struggled through about the first half of it wondering, "Is this a fictional book about horror movies or is this a fictional book about 'true crime'?" It's kinda both and kinda neither. He makes it so clear that the girls are from movies that it feels like, "Why are the police involved in movie crimes?" and Lynette's slasher story is 'real life' which made the story that much more confusing to have both 'fiction' & 'real' in the same story. I read other reviews who posit this takes place in the same reality where the final girls of movies like Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc are all trying to move on with their lives. So the movie actresses experienced real trauma from the scenes on set? The characters were traumatized and spend their remaining days terrified the villain of the movie will escape and come after them again. I get confused even trying to understand it now. So maybe I'm too literal or too dumb to understand it. Some twist on art imitating life, with the girls being in movies and also stalked by "superfans".

But I can tell you-- once I let go of the desire to understand the characters or place the characters in time and space, I enjoyed the story more. That said, who wants to read a book like that, with almost a total suspension of disbelief and kind of scratching their head half the book? I almost DNF but I stuck it out. By the end, I didn't have a horse in the race. I thought the girls all kind of blended together except rich philanthropist Marilyn and Lynette, the washed up 70s starlet. One was a lesbian, one was kind of 'woke'. I was so focused on learning the answer to my questions, I didn't take in a lot of info about the characters.

Despite that, the tone of the piece is like a slasher film from the 80s so I think Grady Hendrix nailed that. The ending was definitely something that could have happened in a FT13 flick, that is to say a rote trope with a neon sign pointing at the ending on the horizon. I didn't dislike the style so much to swear him off as an author. I think I learned "slasher: crazed loose killers" isn't my favorite horror subgenre. I'd take a body horror (The Troop) or paranormal/demon horror (Head Full of Ghosts) over slasher.