Sager cleverly plays on horror-movie themes from Scream to Single White Female, creating an homage without camp. Despite comparisons to Gone Girl, this debut’s strong character development and themes of rebirth and redemption align more closely with Flynn’s Dark Places.
Sager expertly mixes in a set of flashback scenes detailing what happened to Quincy and her friends, slowly pulling back the curtain to reveal a chilling and shocking truth. If you ever wondered what happens to the few surviving characters who actually make it long enough to see the credits roll at the end of slasher movies, Sager provides a dark, haunting, and wildly entertaining answer. Mixing equal parts psychological thriller and crime fiction, Sager’s Final Girls is a must-read for fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.
It’s a page-turner with an intriguing premise, hampered only by bad writing and a general lack of literary merit ... f all you want is an entertaining ride with the approved allotment of blood and action, Final Girls might fit the bill. The suspense is more or less constant, and there are a few sharp, unexpected, if implausible twists; the pacing is swift, with short chapters and alternating timelines, and the book is rarely boring. It is, however, terribly written, the clumsy prose distracting from the action ... Standard fare for the throwaway thriller, but unsatisfying if you want anything more.
It has just the feel of a film with a final girl, and if you like reading Stephen King, or enjoyed the books Harlan Coben was putting out in the 1990s, you’ll love this too ... All the while, you’ll be working out what’s going on, and you’ll probably think you’ve solved it more than once. But Riley Sager has enough twists in her plot to keep your cerebellum on a swivel ... Of course, a great deal hinges on the notion that Quincy has repressed her memories. This is a given in the story, but how and why she’s done this isn’t really explored ... Riley Sager keeps things nice and tricksy as those blood-soaked memories are finally revealed.
While most of the book is written from the heroine’s point of view, Sager weaves scenes from the night Quincy’s friends were slaughtered into the narrative. This is a clever device in that it gives readers information that Quincy can’t access even as it invites readers to question her claims of memory loss. Also, knowing the outcome of this horrible event makes watching it unfold nerve-wracking. This is not to say that readers can feel secure about knowing what they think they know. Sager does an excellent job throughout of keeping the audience guessing until the final twist. A fresh voice in psychological suspense.
...[an] uneven thriller debut ... Sager does a good job building suspense, but some readers may find the book’s themes of casual male power and female subservience after trauma deeply unsettling.
