Final Girls

by Riley Sager

[clementine]

I took a class on horror in undergrad that was one of my favourite classes ever, and I had really high hopes that this book would play with horror tropes in an interesting way. But while it was very trope-y, it certainly didn't subvert them. It had no sense of the irony, humour, or intelligence required to make it a successful satire. It only had cardboard characters and a few cheap twists that were completely unsatisfying because they came out of nowhere. (I actually guessed the identity of the killer purely because there were so few options, but the reveal just feels out of left field in a bad way.) The pacing was slow, the story was repetitive, and the writing was not nearly tight enough to genuinely be thrilling or tense. I wasn't expecting this to be a masterpiece of fine writing, but I thought it would be kind of interesting and fun. Not the case!