A debut psychological thriller. Quincy Carpenter became a Final Girl when she survived the massacre that killed five of her college friends. Years later, when another Final Girl commits suicide, Quincey is thrown back into the media spotlight and the cracks begin to appear in her carefully constructed new life.
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.
