 I think I'm a little biased here. It was the summer of 2011. I had recently begun both my semi-professional critical career and my life in New York City. My then partner picked up a copy of the free weekly newspaper Chopsticks and asked me what I knew about the New York Asian Film Festival, which was being promoted in there and beginning its 10th annual run the following week at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I said nothing, but I wanted in. So I got my editor's approval, found a press email, sent a message, and crossed my fingers. I heard back soon after from one Grady Hendricks, and I thought, that's a fun name. He offered to meet me outside the Walter Reed Theater the following Tuesday because festival screeners at the time were still a few years yet from mass digitization, so I left my internship a half hour early, took the one from Rector Street up to 66, and waited outside the box office. After a couple minutes, this guy came out, whoever he was. A lot of people come out of the Walter Reed though, and I am far too awkward to ask anyone if they are Grady Hendricks, so instead I whipped out my droidex and attempted to find a photo. Unfortunately, this was 2011, and I was getting a 2G signal at best, so not a single freaking photo was loading. I spent literally five minutes glancing back at the guy and then at my phone internally begging it to just load one picture. Even half a picture would have been fine. It never did. But fortunately he ended my misery by asking who I was looking for and I said his name and then he said his name and etc. I saw him a lot over the next few weeks because on top of PR, Grady handled many of the introductions for the screenings, and no one introduces a movie quite like Grady Hendricks. His enthusiasm is infectious, and he's just got away with words, so it makes sense that he was a writer and would soon publish his first fiction. It started in 2012 with a pair of novellas Occupy Space and Satan Loves You, which are fun little romps, but 2014's Horror Store really stepped things up and found him his niche. I mean, who hasn't walked into an Ikea and wondered what sort of horrors lark beneath all those dang beds? As a genuine fan and at least friend adjacent, I've always tried to show up to support his work. At the launch party for My Best Friends Exorcism at the Anthology Film Archive in 2016, I saw the live show that accompanied paperbacks from hell in Brooklyn the next year, and the one for We Sold Our Souls in LA the year after that. To be clear, I didn't go to LA to see him perform like I'm kind of weird, but I'm not that weird. It just happened to be the case that he was performing while I was there visiting some friends, and since he didn't do the show at all in New York, I figured I could spare an hour or so. I don't need to explain myself to you. And I followed along with the super scary haunted homeschool podcast he did to promote Southern Book Club's guide to slang, Vampires, whose success would bring him into the hallowed halls of a New York Times bestselling author. Also I read them. They're really good. And now he's released his first book since Reaching That Status. And it's also really good. Hello, by the way, and welcome to the Week Air Review. You can call me a hipster in this one particular situation. And today I am talking about the Final Girl support group. In the preface to the Princeton Classics edition of her seminal work Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover laments the way that the Final Girl, a term that she coined in a journal article that was later adapted to the first chapter of her book, has changed. She writes, The Final Girl now circulates in these mostly cleaner and more upscale venues as a female Avenger, triumphant feminist hero, and the like. The Final Girl brings down the killer in the final moments, but consider how she spent a good hour of the film up to then being chased and almost caught, hiding, running, falling, rising in pain and fleeing again, seeing her friends mangled and killed by weapon-wielding killers, and so on. Tortured survivor might be a better term than hero, or given the element of last minute luck, accidental survivor, or as I call her, victim hero, with an emphasis on victim. And she clarifies elsewhere that hero should always be understood as implying some degree of monstrosity. It's interesting to read that in 2021 and to do so less than 24 hours after finishing the Final Girl support group, because Grady does steer away from Clover's more academic definition, which heavily leans into the relative masculinity of these characters for something a lot less complex. But even so, I do think he follows some of that basic premise here and honestly, the tension between monster, hero, and even victim sits at the heart of this story. The Final Girl support group is about a literal support group of six women who survived some of cinema's most infamous massacres. You see, the book is set in an alternate reality with just one small but interesting tweak. The big classics of the slasher genre were based on specific events rather than generally influenced by them. Where the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was inspired by Ed Gein, the panhandle meathook is pulled from the experiences of the real Marilyn Torres, named for the actress who portrayed the very first Final Girl in Tobey Hooper's incredibly influential 1974 film. The details of each of these stories are tweaked, of course, but we know who The Dream King represents and what Camp Red Lake really is. The latter plays a key role in the book, having just been the site of yet another massacre when the story begins. And a new Final Girl is born, as another is after all of that finally killed. We follow Lynette Tarkington, survivor of one of Slasherdom's most memorable deaths, Linnea Quigley's impalement on a set of deer antlers in Silent Night Deadly Night by a guy dressed as Santa Claus. In the film, Denise dies immediately. In the book, Lynette hangs for 10 hours. She witnesses the deaths of friends, family, police officers, and then finally her would-be killer as the antlers keep her alive but immobile and in excruciating pain. But she survived and then she survived again when the guy's brother came to finish the job too. The presence and survival of that sequel story is key. There's always a sequel, right? And that's what makes the film so existentially scary because even if you do somehow kill the masked figure at the end of it, someone else is going to take his place. And all of that was kind of the inspiration for this book in the first place. In 1981, a young Grady Hendricks bought himself a copy of Fangoria, Volume 1, Issue 12, and read the cover story about the opening of Friday the 13th, Part 2, in which the young woman who survived the brutality of Pamela Vorhees and so memorably ended her reign of terror is unceremoniously murdered in her apartment. The callousness of this moment, which actress Adrian King didn't know was coming because no one told her what the scene was or what the movie was or what her part in it was. The entire thing was improvised and its ending was a genuine shock to her, which what the actual fuck. Struck him and decades later, he took the chance to rewrite that story by excising it. After Camp Red Lake's final girl, Adrian Butler, dispatches her foe, she goes on to be the best of them all, buying the site of her tragedy and reopening it as a place where young women can come to help them get through tough times. And that's awesome, and I certainly wouldn't have minded if there was more of her in the book, but I can also understand how this story really doesn't work from the perspective of someone who has stabilized. No, we need the true tortured survivor. If you have seen David Gordon Green's 2018 sequel slash reboot of Halloween, it is not dissimilar. Lynette has incredibly severe PTSD, and so she has created a barricade in her tiny apartment with a metal cage behind the door, blackout curtains on the windows, and no living soul except for a plant with whom she periodically imagines herself having full conversations. She is trapped in that time of her life and pushed away any real hope of normality out of a deep, deep fear of her fellow men. And of course, it's men because most ultraviolence is committed by men in life and in fiction. One of the struggles of any alternate history is how the changes change things, the butterfly effect and all of that. How would the world be different if the panhandled meat hook were literally true instead of just pretending to be true as Texas Chainsaw does? Or would it at all? I would think that the answer has to be yes, but when the book sets up its period by referencing oil spills, WikiLeaks, and the Tea Party transporting me right back to still not great, but much less existentially devastating 2010, I don't know that it would be. In small sections of the internet, sure, and the murder-belia cottage industry that is referenced and briefly depicted in the book would probably exist in a form kinda like that, but a few extra serial killings in the 70s and 80s wouldn't stop like 9-11. And so through all of those real-world tragedies, these fictional women, the final girls, had each other as their support group. And that's nice. There's no real silver lining to an experience like that, but knowing that others went through something similar and being able to meet with them on the regs certainly makes it better than being completely alone. But also, the group is coming apart. As I said, it's 2010. We are decades out from their respective tragedies and many years from the ends of the various film franchises that their tragedies spawned. What purpose is it still serving to constantly revisit the past? No one is scared of boogie men with meat hooks anymore. We're not afraid of unkillable monsters. We are afraid of monsters who are all too willing to die as long as they maximize the carnage in their wake. Or are we? Grady finished the first draft of what would become this book all the way back in 2014 and then tried again in 2016 and 2019, but even after it had been picked up, there was still something he had to figure out. And in August of 2020, he did. It was a time when all of us were afraid again of the monster that we couldn't see but knew was there, the killer that could take the form of anyone from strangers on the street to our loved ones. We developed a collective paranoia of close contact. The only way we could safely interact was from a distance. It is obviously impossible to really understand the experiences that these women went through, but the last year made some of that behavior just a little less strange. And ultimately, it turned out that Lynette's fear was not misplaced because that camp Red Lake Massacre Lynette saw on the news seems to have been the start of a new plan to stamp out the Scream Queens once and for all. And they're not doing it the old fashioned way. Bullets fly by page 50 and we spend the rest of the book with Lynette as she works to outrun and outsmart her assailant, trying to be the hero of the story rather than its victim. And throughout she seeks to warn the others that these events are all connected and that they are all in grave danger, but no one believes her. Everyone has coped with the trauma in their own way, but none of them let the paranoia consume them the way that Lynette has. And it's kind of graded on the others over the years. And sure, as readers, it seems pretty clear that there is some kind of conspiracy, but at the same time, maybe she's wrong. Bad things are happening, but does her being targeted really mean that there is something bigger going on? I mean, we are trapped in her head. Is she an unreliable narrator? This is a woman who spends hours commuting to places that should take minutes because she wants to ensure that she's not being followed. Memorizing the footwear of each person she walks by because it's easy to change a jacket, but it is highly unlikely that someone will change their shoes. Honestly, it's pretty good advice even if I won't ever use it. She's conditioned herself to see danger around every corner and make plans upon plans upon plans to get out of any situation that may arise. But what happens when those fail? What happens when she's wrong about who her enemies are? And so she must run. Most of the final girl support group is spent in flight mode, though there is the inevitable turn to fight as the puzzle pieces finally come together. And it is a wild ride full of twists, both expected and not all told in an easy breezy style that makes reading it just a pleasure. I knew going in that I was going to review this book, so when I picked it up from my local bookstore on release day, I figured I would get through it by the weekend. I was done the next evening. Honestly, it took me longer to get through the first chapter of men, women, and chainsaws than it did to get through the entirety of the final girl support group. The week of its launch, Grady did a mostly virtual tour for the book, culminating in a live performance this past Friday at Powerhouse Arena Bookstore in Dumbo. As usual, it was book-adjacent, giving us a general guide on how not to get murdered using his vast knowledge of both horror cinema and horror literature to explain why we must not make friends, must drop out of school, and must never go anywhere or do anything. It was often funny, sometimes emotional, and occasionally enlightening, all words that I could use to describe the book as well where I'm so inclined. The final girl support group was used in part as a way for Grady to interrogate his own interest in the genre. Why does he, and by extension, why do we, gravitate towards these gory displays of women being brutalized? What does it say about us, that many of the characters whose deaths are seared into our minds aren't even given the dignity of a last name? They're just meat for the slaughter. I like slasher films, I enjoy the fantasy of a knife-wielding maniac in a world of mass shootings, but I do certainly prefer when the characters have more going on than tits in a screen. And I appreciate that Grady has made a book that gives interiority and humanity to these women who never got it. 8.0 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, and thank you particularly to my mom, Hammer and Marco, Cat Saracotta, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliott Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Liam Knipe, Willow, I Am The Sword, Timmo, Riley Zimmerman, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you like this video, great, if not, oh well. I am hoping to get a second video out this week, been like a year and a half since I've done that, so we'll see, but it's related on the Fear Street trilogy that Netflix just put out. So I hope to see you then.