‘Final Girls’ offers cheap thrills bogged down by rotten writing
Touted by Stephen King as “the first great thriller of 2017,”
Final Girls — the first novel published by Riley Sager, the ambiguously gendered pseudonym for author Todd Ritter — is well-positioned to be one of this summer’s popular beach reads.
It’s a page-turner with an intriguing premise, hampered only by bad writing and a general lack of literary merit.
Ten years ago, Quincy Carpenter, then a college student, became the sole survivor of the Pine Cottage Murders, a massacre that claimed five of her friends. Now a successful baking blogger living with her public defender boyfriend in a beautiful Manhattan apartment, she likes to think she’s gotten past the trauma — she’s even conveniently forgotten most of that night’s events. Only her wine and Xanax dependency, some light kleptomania and a complete unwillingness to talk about the murders say otherwise.
But her denial holds no sway with the press, which labels Quincy a “Final Girl” — one of three sole female survivors of headlinegrabbing massacres who fascinate the public. When the first of the Final Girls is found dead in her bathtub, the second one shows up in New York, looking for Quincy. Sam is cagey about her history and quick to force intimacy with Quincy. She doesn’t buy the all-iswell front, and seems dead set on releasing Quincy’s demons, including her repressed memories of the murders.
This is all swell, and if all you want is an entertaining ride with the approved allotment of blood and action, Final Girls (Dutton, 339 pp., might fit the bill. The suspense is more or less constant, and there are a few sharp, unexpected, if implausible twists; the pacing is swift, with short chapters and alternating timelines, and the book is rarely boring.
It is, however, terribly written, the clumsy prose distracting from the action. “She was like human sandpaper in that regard,” Quincy says of her slaughtered best friend. “Rough and soothing in equal measure.” Sager seems to have little use for subtlety. A tense dinner scene — in which people who have just met behave outrageously toward one another without much justification — includes two separate red wine spills, “(w)hite fabric turning red.” You know, like with blood.
And then there’s the part where Quincy and Sam go to Central Park looking to play vigilante and almost instantly stumble on an assault of a female pedestrian, the attacker “(s)hrouded in a black hoodie, he even looks like a shadow” with “a shock of raven-black hair, cocoa skin on the back of his neck.” The whole episode is shoddily constructed, and it includes the only likely appearance of a black person in the entire book.
Of course, this book isn’t about black men; it’s about the tragic damage and inspiring resiliency of an attractive white woman, one of the string of “girl” novels trailing in Gillian Flynn’s wake.
Final Girls is an outlier in that it’s by a male author, and it features some flimsy, borderline insulting portrayals of sexy bad girls and toxic female friendship: standard fare for the throwaway thriller, but unsatisfying if you want anything more.