Book Review: Final Girls

Reading an author's first novel after having read all their later works is an experience of its own. And nothing exemplifies this fact better than Riley Sager, whose 2017 thriller debut, Final Girls (another of those "girl" novels trailing in Gillian Flynn's wake), is a far cry from the material he would go on to put out in subsequent years. There's a sliver of promise in its intriguing premise, which tries to give a new spin to the final girl trope common in slasher films, delving into the life of Quincy Carpenter, who has moved on from the bloody massacre that killed her friends to a fresh start in Manhattan with a boyfriend, a successful baking blog, and a steady supply of Xanax. Then another final girl, who survived a sorority house attack, dies in an apparent act of suicide, and Quincy's past begins to unravel, slowly exposing the cracks in her carefully constructed world. Sager sets up a complex-enough puzzle, but struggles to get going, what with a slow, ponderous plot development setting the stage for a series of twists and turns that lead to a thrilling climax. But that can't make up for the shoddily written prose or the problematic portrayal of trauma survivors.