curiouslykatt's Reviews (1.12k)

Survivors(readers) of The Final Girl Support Group, we meet Thursday nights at 6:06pm. Bring snacks. Bring wine because we need to unpack this one together. 

I’m going to start saying I have yet to be disappointed in a book by Grady Hendrix and this one is my fourth. In a time honoured classic there’s a first time for everything, so this one was a bust for me. 

Right from the hop something felt off about the writing of this one and bless @see.kat.read for letting me voice memo her along the way explaining my weird melange of feelings as I was reading. 

One) Hendrix this far has never written a male lead. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s a weird vibe now I can’t shake and it really hit me in the face while reading this one. Mainly due to the fact this is such a female heavy focused story. 

Two) something about the pacing of this one didn’t work for me and in conjunction with the writing style it was too chaotic and messy for me. This is a Kat the reader issue, because I love slasher films and the final girls but I enjoy them in the apex of their survival fight. So examining them thereafter when of course they would be messy, riddled with panic, and on the brink of insanity, makes sense, but those aren’t the girls I love. I’m the problem here. 

Three) There are some great Easter eggs for Slasher film lovers, throughout you’ll be seeing bits and pieces from your favourite films which is a nice touch. 

Four) I don’t know how much of this was meant to be a satire, a parody, and an homage to Final Girls. I really didn’t grasp what Hendrix was trying to do with this one. Again a Kat the reader issue. I’m the problem. 

There just weren’t enough good points for me to love this one, and by the last third I just wanted to be done. 

If this is your first Hendrix book and you didn’t like it, try another one because I really feel his better writing is elsewhere. This one is not the one. 

Holy shit. I loved this one. It Will Just Be Us is a grotesquely fascinating Frankenstein, pulling together my favourite parts of horror and the macabre to create a very creepy gothic horror novel. 

After Sam is assaulted and left on the streets, she decides to return home. Not the flat she was living in, no, no, her ancestral home the Wakefield manor. The derelict manor in disrepair and rotting with decay. The manor sinking at the edge of Virginia swampland. The manor haunted by memories. Sam and her ailing mother see flickers of memories and are accustomed to reliving the past in the winding halls and behind locked doors. Soon their uneasy peace is turned over when Sam’s sister Elizabeth has decided to leave her husband and return home to the manor to see through her pregnancy. 

Sam is used to the house showing her flickering memories of former manor residents, but something is different now that Elizabeth has arrived. Are these memories, or are some ghost flickers of future Wakefields? 

Right from the hop Kaplan begins her creepy story and she doesn’t let up. There is a weird section in the middle that gets a bit too meta for my personal brand of horror, but it doesn’t last long. I thought I was going to get House of Leaves but I got so many pieces of classic horror I adore. 

If you’re a fan of The Winchester House, Shirley Jacksonesque horror style around grief, the Netflix series of The Haunting Of Hill House, the film aesthetic of Kubrick Re: The Shining and a slow burn haunted house story, you’ll want to pick this one up. 

CW: animal abuse (frogs and birds), suicide, domestic violence, physical assault