Final Girls
A Novel
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4.1 • 97 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
“If you liked Gone Girl, you’ll like this.”—Stephen King
Ten years ago, six friends went on vacation. One made it out alive….
In that instant, college student Quincy Carpenter became a member of a very exclusive club—a group of survivors the press dubbed “The Final Girls”: Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who endured the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape the massacre at Pine Cottage. Despite the media's attempts, the three girls have never met.
Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life. Her mind won’t let her recall the events of that night; the past is in the past…until the first Final Girl is found dead in her bathtub and the second Final Girl appears on Quincy's doorstep.
Blowing through Quincy's life like a hurricane, Sam seems intent on making her relive the trauma of her ordeal. When disturbing details about Lisa's death emerge, Quincy desperately tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies while evading both the police and bloodthirsty reporters. Quincy knows that in order to survive she has to remember what really happened at Pine Cottage.
Because the only thing worse than being a Final Girl is being a dead one.
WINNER OF THE 2018 INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS AWARD FOR BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A “final girl” is the one left standing at the end of a horror movie. Riley Sager’s thriller revolves around Quincy Carpenter, the lone survivor of a gruesome killing spree in a remote forest cabin. Quincy is desperately trying to live a normal life with her lawyer boyfriend, but the past—and her connection to two other women who eluded deranged murderers—keeps getting in the way. We tore through Final Girls in a weekend, delighted by its satisfying surprises and scares.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Quincy "Quinn" Carpenter, the heroine of Sager's uneven thriller debut, and five college friends spend a weekend in the Pennsylvania woods at the remote Pine Cottage, where a knife-wielding maniac kills everyone but her. She is only spared because Officer Cooper ("Coop") shoots the culprit. Quinn, who remembers no details, isn't the only lone survivor of such a massacre around the same time: Lisa Milner survives a sorority house attack, and Samantha Boyd fights off a motel killer. Lisa is the only one of the three who embraces the media's "final girl" label a trope familiar to horror movie buffs, referring to the girl who survives the bloodbath and even writes a book about her experience. Quinn wants nothing to do with her fellow "girls," and 10 years later has settled down in Manhattan with a boyfriend, a baking blog, and lots of Xanax. Then Coop shows up and tells Quinn that Lisa is dead, and the nightmare starts anew. Sager does a good job building suspense, but some readers may find the book's themes of casual male power and female subservience after trauma deeply unsettling.
