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3.5 stars
What if all our favorite slasher movies were based on real-life cases?
And that's the premise of this book.




I liked the clever spin on the slasher genre and I liked all the nods to iconic horror films. I also liked how self-aware Hendrix was about the violence toward women in those films and how he addressed it without becoming preachy.
Part of the genre is mindless violence. But another part is that we like to see our worst fears played out in front of us. We like to run those worst-case scenarios in our heads to figure out how we would escape the monster. We scream at the characters to run and we scoff when they take their first wobbly step into the basement.
We imagine ourselves as the final girl.



So. This was clever.
Buuuuut. There was something missing, too.
I wish I had cared more about the characters, but I just couldn't. A big part of that might have been because we're stuck inside the head of Lynette for the entire book, and out of all the final girls, she's the least interesting and/or sympathetic. She's completely crazy-pants to the point that she's an OCD survivalist hermit whose only friend is a plant she thinks is sentient.
The rest of the girls (women) in the story are scarred and banged up, but they're all functioning humans.
Not Lynette.
And that's who we go on this ride with.



The grand finale with the killer is pretty good, but the wrap-up has an afterschool special vibe that didn't quite do it for me.
However, this was a winner for me in the sense that I'm really interested in reading some of Hendrix's older books. I've been hearing about this author for quite a while now, so it was great to finally see what it is that makes his take on things so unique.



Recommended.