Final Girl vs. Final Girl vs. Final Girl

 

   

Okay, so maybe that title is a little click-bait-y.  I got the idea for this post when Grady Hendrix's newest book, The Final Girl Support Group, came out this year.  As is often the case, when there's a new trend emerging, it is easy to compare the books to each other.  These three authors - Stephen Graham Jones, Grady Hendrix, and Riley Sager - are, in my opinion, very well known authors in the horror/thriller genres. And all three of them wrote books that took the horror trope of the 'final girl' and asked what happened after the movie ended.  As a fun reading project, I read all of the above books in a pretty short timeframe (about 4 weeks) and decided to sort of compare and contrast them to help others pick out the one that would work best for them.  I also wrote standalone reviews for each of these books in my usual format - linked below.

Final Girls - Riley Sager

The Last Final Girl - Stephen Graham Jones

The Final Girl Support Group - Grady Hendrix 

Since this isn't an English class and I don't feel like writing a 10 page essay to fully compare and contrast the books, I put together some simple graphics to show how I felt the books fell on those scales.  Of course, this is all personal opinion and these are not the only books that use or explore the final girl trope.  However, these are the three that I see mentioned most often by the readers/reviewers/book influencers that I follow so they are the ones I focused on.

Year Published

My Rating

Time Post Initial Slaughter

Use of Final Girl Trope

 

Integration of Slasher Knowledge/Lore

 

Bloodiness 

Widest Commercial Appeal

If You Only Have Time For One

I'd also like to give an honorable mention to My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones.  It is also a book where the final girl trope and slasher flicks are heavily referenced and used in the plot but it felt so different than these other three that when I did try to include it on the above graphics, it felt like comparing apples and oranges.  I did write a full review of My Heart is A Chainsaw and I gave it 5 stars, but it is a much more literary horror and I felt the three books above fell more into the horror/thriller genre.  Also, the protagonist in that book does not fit the same final girl criteria as the protagonists in the rest of these books so, again, I didn't think it was fair to include it in the comparisons.