This thriller follows Quincy Carpenter 10 years after she survived a horror-movie style massacre at a vacation cabin. Now, she's managed to recover from that night and lives in NYC with her defense lawyer fiance, Jeff. She spends her days baking and updating her successful baking blog and trying to put that part of her life behind her. Until one day when she runs into a woman named Sam who tells her that Lisa has been murdered. Sam, Lisa, and Quincy were each the survivor of their own personal horror movies and the press lumped them together and called them "The Final Girls". Eventually, each woman went out on their own but with Lisa dead and Sam at her doorstep, Quincy might finally be forced to try and remember exactly what happened at the cabin in the woods all those years ago.
So, full disclosure, I DNF'd this at about the 20% mark in August of 2020. And I'll be honest, I wish I'd never picked it back up. The only reason I did continue reading this now is because of the Final Girl reading project I decided to do and while this isn't the first book about the final girl trope ever written, I do think it was the most widely known for a few years and thus it seemed important to include in the project. The reasons I DNF'd last year were basically the writing - the characters were not well developed and the writing style was really heavy with the foreshadowing. The scene that made me decide to actually DNF? Quincy, Sam, and Jeff were all having dinner together and someone spills their glass of red wine and the heavy-handedness of the prose where obviously Sager wanted to use the red wine spreading on the table cloth as a symbol of blood yadda-yadda-yadda. Upon finishing the book, I can now confidently say this wasn't for me, and the issues I had with the first 20% continued through the rest of the story.
The pacing of this book was the best part about it (and it still wasn't that good). The story starts off pretty slow with Quincy baking a bunch of stuff and trying to figure out the best way to decorate/photograph them for her blog. Quincy has no memories of what happened to her and her friends during the massacre but she does seem to have some underlying panic or anxiety generally in her life (enough so that she has a prescription for Xanax). As the book progresses, we see the events of that night in the cabin unfold so we know that, by the end, at least the reader will know what happened. It isn't immediately obvious if Quincy will remember the events or not since she seems very content on not remembering and doesn't like it when Sam tries to push her to remember. These flashbacks happen more frequently as the story progresses so they work to sort of artificially increase the pacing and tension in the story. For me, the main plot of the book was really frustrating because it was just Quincy sort of falling apart because Sam came into her life and injected a bunch of chaos that she didn't need. Sure, that chaos does eventually lead to Quincy's memories starting to break through her mental block but not nearly enough to support the plot on their own. We needed the flashbacks to propel the reader forward in the story as a sort of promise that we will find out what happened that night in the woods, eventually.
The characters in this book were infuriating in the worst ways. I've heard multiple people express their opinion that Riley Sager doesn't write women characters well and I haven't read enough of his works to make a broad generalization like that, I can say that the women in this book did not read like real people. Now, obviously, this is a work of fiction and are there real-life women who may act exactly like the characters in this book? Sure. Are they the majority? Absolutely not. I can't go into exact details because of spoilers, but suffice to say that some of the situations Sam and Quincy put themselves in and the way they conduct themselves while out in public are so unrealistic to me that I couldn't think about it too much or else I'd get mad and I just had to accept that they needed to do that because of *plot reasons*. And I think this problem was exacerbated by the fact that the choices they make don't even feel like choices their characters would make. For example, if a character in a book went base jumping off the Grand Canyon, that would be an activity that most people would not choose to do and thus some readers might label it as 'unrealistic' . However, if the character is written as an adrenaline junkie or as being super reckless, then it would make sense for that character to do that activity even if most 'normal' people wouldn't. I didn't get any such characterization details that would really explain why Sam and/or Quincy would act this way. I also felt Quincy had a weird lack of agency throughout the book that I didn't love. She always seemed to more or less go along with what Sam, Jeff, or Coop (the police officer that found her after the massacre) wanted for her. She would occasionally put up a little bit of a fuss, but I never got a good sense of what Quincy actually wanted (and maybe that's on purpose because she doesn't know what she wants either, but if that's the case then that should be made more clear in her characterization). The only character I actually liked was Jeff and he deserved way better than what he got in this book.
Thrillers, to me, should be thrilling and have some twists and reveals in the narrative. This book did have some surprise reveals, but I was not thrilled in the least and the few reveals we did get really didn't land for me. So much of this plot felt so incidental and almost accidental that it is a miracle Quincy actually remembered anything. The two main reveals we get in the book both came out of nowhere and they were the type of reveals that should have had breadcrumbs that the reader could have picked up on. There should have been cracks in the plot where we could have seen flashes of the truth coming through, even if Quincy didn't specifically pick up on them. After I DNF'd the first time, I did look up spoilers on what happens at the end so I did know the big reveal and I was specifically looking for the breadcrumbs while I was reading - I didn't pick up on any. Then, in the actual climax of the book where we get the big reveal and I was so ready for some sort of big final slasher-movie type chase scene or something we instead get a *womp-womp* ending where it is pretty much solved immediately. It didn't feel like the climax was more than like 3 pages and not nearly long enough for the conclusion to be at all satisfying. So to all the people who say in their reviews that the writing and characterization was so-so but the ending was amazing and makes it worth the read - I'm glad it worked for you, but I disagree.
Finally, I want to talk about the final girl trope and how it was used in this book (since that was the whole reason I made myself read this again). In short, I thought the use of the final girl trope felt like an easy out and made for a gimmick-y book pitch that people would be interested in. On the one hand, the whole point of getting a book deal is to sell books and this is the first book published under the "Riley Sager" pen-name so it makes sense that they wanted to play up that aspect of the book. However, in my reading experience the final girl aspect and the fallout from those events weren't used nearly as much as I think they should have been. We get a little summary of how/why these three women are connected but we're told they haven't really had much contact over the past few years and don't have any ties to each other except the fact that they're all final girls. Going back to the characterization issues, I don't believe that Quincy would readily invite Sam into her home when Quincy has done just about everything she can to forget about being a final girl. I needed more of a link between the three women and Sager did not establish the final girl connection nearly enough for me to be on board with it as a plot device. Also, Quincy seems to have little to no lasting effects or PTSD-type reactions to anything. I would think that even if she can't remember the specifics that maybe she'd have some quirks that effect her life now. For example, maybe if she almost drowned in a lake then she would never want to take a bath and she wouldn't know the exact connection but she'd know that she hates baths and refuses to take one.
In conclusion, some DNFs should stay DNFs, even if you're doing a reading project.
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