BOOK REVIEW | FINAL GIRLS – RILEY SAGER

Title: Final Girls Author: Riley Sager Publication date: 11th July 2017 My rating: ★★ Goodreads rating: 3.81 Pages: 342 Genre: Horror/Thriller

Spoiler free review. I talk about aspects of the book, but nothing that gives the plot away as a whole.

I purchased a copy of this book and all views are my own.

So let me start by saying that I am never one to quit a book. I started listening to the audible version of this book by Riley Sager back on November 23rd 2019, and just did not like the narrator. Audible narrators are what makes the book pop out and make you want to stay and keep on listening. This did not work for me at all, so I quit the Audible version in February. I went ahead and picked up the book on May 1st and finished it in one single sitting.

Synopsis:

Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls: Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet. Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past. That is until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit; and Sam, the second Final Girl, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.

Overall Opinion of the Book:

This was Riley Sager’s debut novel in 2017. I had read so many great reviews about it, that I was expecting nothing but thrills and suspense from the beginning. The thing is I read Lock Every Door first and there was simply no comparison between the two. Lock Every Door set the bar high for me, so I was expecting plenty from this debut.

I got bored fairly soon. The perspective and narration clumsily shift during the flashbacks. The complete back-story to the “Final Girl” moniker is poorly done and very unbelievable. The twist is dumb, the suspense is non-existent, and the ending is insulting. What could have been a complex story about a crime of passion, unrequited love, or true crime, ends up being just a cluster of nothing memorable? There was simply no horror or suspense for me, until the very end.