Final Girls - Riley Sager

I wanted to read a Stephen King novel for my Popsugar Reading Challenge.  I really did.  I was aiming for the "horror" genre for the category of "A bestseller from a genre you don't usually read," and Stephen King was the clear fit.  But there was a problem, and the problem was It.  Because of the new screen adaptation of It that came out recently, every single Stephen King novel at the library had a substantial waitlist that I knew I would never make it to the top of by the end of the year.  And so I started looking for alternatives.  And then came Final Girls, which is up for a Goodreads Choice award in the horror category and which Amazon is touting as an international bestseller, and which I already had in my apartment courtesy of Book of the Month.  And so off I went.

When she was nineteen, Quincy Carpenter survived a massacre that left five of her friends dead, and has suffered from amnesia regarding the events of that night ever since.  She switched schools, graduated, and moved to New York, where she runs a successful baking blog.  She eschews her status as a "Final Girl," aka the last girl standing at the end of a horror movie, and avoids contact with her two compatriots from other massacres, Lisa and Sam--and Sam has been off the grid for the past few years, anyway.  But that changes when Cooper, the cop who found Sam and killed the guy responsible for the deaths of her friends, contacts her to let her know that Lisa killed herself, and Sam shows up on her doorstep.  And when questions about Lisa's death start to come up, and Sam continues to press Quincy for details and pushes her towards the end, nothing is certain.

I did quite like this.  Quincy is just unstable enough to make you wonder if she really did kill everyone in the cabin, though there are several possible suspects floating around besides the one who actually did the killing.  I didn't catch on to any of the twists, and while I am naturally suspicious of every single person in a horror or thriller novel (the two genres seem to have converged somewhat in recent years) I didn't peg down what was happening here.  I even nursed a suspicion that Quincy's boyfriend was the person who had killed everyone and that he'd then sought her out for a relationship because he hadn't succeeded in killing her, mainly because this was the plot of an episode of Criminal Minds that I thought could fit the circumstances here.

Quincy is an interesting main character.  She is not a good person, and whether or not that is because of the trauma of Pine Cottage is up for debate.  She seems to have had issues, potentially dangerous ones, even before that, and they come raging to the surface once Sam enters her life.  I honestly found myself upset that Quincy didn't get her comeuppance at the end; though I liked her in the beginning of the book, she did some truly awful things in the middle that I felt her trauma could not excuse, and there was a disturbing lack of consequences in regards to them.

There was a disproportionate amount of baking here for a horror novel and I felt that the actual "horror" scenes were pretty far between--the entire cabin sequence, past and present, is of course the main source of horror here, in the traditional fashion and kind of Cabin in the Woods-esque but without the larger overarching meta-story--and the pacing sometimes felt slow and more like a traditional mystery.  I frequently found myself paging ahead to the next "Pine Cottage" chapter to see how long I would have to wait to get back to what was the real exciting sequence.

Overall, this was a good book, but the pacing was somewhat uneven and I'm not really sure if it was a true "horror" novel or more of a thriller; there seemed to be some crossover at parts, though, and Goodreads says it's horror, so I'm going to count it for the challenge.  Maybe I've been thinking horror is something other than what it actually is for a while now.

3 stars out of 5.