grady hendrix – Pleasant Nights

Title: The Final Girl Support Group

Author: Grady Hendrix

Genre: thriller/horror

Thank you Netgalley for this copy!

Wow, did Grady Hendrix knock it out of the park again. I’ve only read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which I also loved, and definitely need to back to his previous books. I couldn’t read this one quickly enough. I was dying (pun intended) to get to the end. Lynette, the main character, is a final girl. Meaning she was the last girl standing at the end of slasher-movie type event, but a real-life one. Of course, they made movies about the girls and the horrors they lived through, but these survivors have found each other and attend a monthly support group.

From Goodreads: In horror movies, the final girl is the one who’s left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she’s not alone. For more than a decade she’s been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette’s worst fears are realized–someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

Don’t confuse this book with Final Girls by Riley Sager, which is just an okay book. They follow the same basic concept, but that’s about it. Lynette is a badass in this book. And she is jerked around by every other character in various ways, but she keeps standing to protect those around her. The other final girls have their own quirks, but all are survivors. One in particular, though, embraced the dark side, which was my favorite part of the book because of the creepiness. I thought this book was fantastic. It’s suspenseful, horrifying, and such a fun read.

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires

As much as I love horror, I’ve never read a Grady Hendrix book. I admit that I judged his books by the cover (and title, really). I expected them to be campy and cheesy and ridiculous. What I found was quite the opposite, though. This book was awesome, simple as that. I cannot wait to read his others now.

From Goodreads:

Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula in this Southern-flavored supernatural thriller set in the ’90s about a women’s book club that must protect its suburban community from a mysterious and handsome stranger who turns out to be a blood-sucking fiend.

Patricia Campbell had always planned for a big life, but after giving up her career as a nurse to marry an ambitious doctor and become a mother, Patricia’s life has never felt smaller. The days are long, her kids are ungrateful, her husband is distant, and her to-do list is never really done. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a group of Charleston mothers united only by their love for true-crime and suspenseful fiction. In these meetings, they’re more likely to discuss the FBI’s recent siege of Waco as much as the ups and downs of marriage and motherhood.

But when an artistic and sensitive stranger moves into the neighborhood, the book club’s meetings turn into speculation about the newcomer. Patricia is initially attracted to him, but when some local children go missing, she starts to suspect the newcomer is involved. She begins her own investigation, assuming that he’s a Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. What she uncovers is far more terrifying, and soon she–and her book club–are the only people standing between the monster they’ve invited into their homes and their unsuspecting community.

I grew up in and currently live in the south. I know people that are exactly like these characters. Anything out of the ordinary is immediately rejected. Several of the characters are super religious, so anything they don’t perceive as Christian-like, isn’t given a second thought, which is a major plot point in this book as well. The gross factor was pretty high in places. There’s one scene (this isn’t a spoiler) where a cockroach climbs into a person’s ear. Ever since seeing Star Trek Wrath of Khan as a child where the thing crawls into the guy’s ear, I’ve had a phobia of this very event. The cockroach scene almost sent me over the edge. Gah. But I flew through this tightly-written, creative, excellent book. Highly recommend.