Final Girls by Riley Sager

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊⯨

Spice Rating: 🫑

Blurb:

Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie–scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet.
 
Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.
 
That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.

My Review:

What happens to the ones who survive?

That is the question sitting at the heart of this book, and Riley Sager does not let you look away from it for a single page. Final girls, the ones who made it out of mass killings, who somehow kept breathing when everyone around them didn't, are supposed to be the lucky ones. But luck is a complicated thing when the nightmares follow you home and normal starts to feel like a language you no longer speak.

Our FMC is not adjusted. She is not fine. She is doing what survivors do, holding it together on the outside while something much messier lives underneath. And just when the fragile life she has built starts to feel manageable, other final girls start turning up dead. The very women who understood her world in a way nobody else could, gone. And the feeling that leaves behind is not just grief. It is something darker and more unsettling that crawls under your skin and stays there.

This book gives you a lot to digest. The layers build slowly and deliberately, and just when you think you have found solid ground the story shifts beneath you. I had a feeling about the twist, that particular gut instinct that starts whispering halfway through a thriller, and even then, watching it unfold was deeply satisfying. The kind of reveal that makes you flip back through pages to see what you missed.

If you want a thriller that keeps you guessing, keeps you uncomfortable, and keeps you turning pages long past when you should have put it down, this is exactly the book for you.