#BookReview ‘The Last Final Girl’ by Stephen Graham Jones

Horror

About the book…

Life in a slasher film is easy. You just have to know when to die.

Aerial View: A suburban town in Texas. Everyone’s got an automatic garage door opener. All the kids jump off a perilous cliff into a shallow river as a rite of passage. The sheriff is a local celebrity. You know this town. You’re from this town.

Zoom In: Homecoming princess, Lindsay. She’s just barely escaped death at the hands of a brutal, sadistic murderer in a Michael Jackson mask. Up on the cliff, she was rescued by a horse and bravely defeated the killer, alone, bra-less. Her story is already a legend. She’s this town’s heroic final girl, their virgin angel.

Monster Vision: Halloween masks floating down that same river the kids jump into. But just as one slaughter is not enough for Billie Jean, our masked killer, one victory is not enough for Lindsay. Her high school is full of final girls, and she’s not the only one who knows the rules of the game.

When Lindsay chooses a host of virgins, misfits, and former final girls to replace the slaughtered members of her original homecoming court, it’s not just a fight for survival-it’s a fight to become ‘The Last Final Girl’

The danger with having a book like this in the post ‘Scream’ world is that most teens are imtimately aware of the tropes of horror movies and real life slashers. How then to make it new, to breathe, as it were, fresh life into the rotting old corpse?

By taking this approach and making it allegorical and metafcitional.

Take all the standards-the prom queen, the homecoming football match, the end of school and the big step into the beyond of adulthood, and dump a bucket of pigs blood onto it.

Sly references and digs abound, from characters names through to place names, all nods to the genre that created it. And what better villain to have, than to have him wear a Michael Jackson mask, a mask of the man who made his own face into a mask, a man made famous by the alterations beyond all recognition, to both his appearance and his race?

And if that doesn’t strike you as a particularly scary modern bogeyman, try Googling Michael Jackson masks, it’s pretty bloody terrifying.

He represents reality, adulthood, the next step on the ladder of progression which many parents would almost rather their children do not take, rather, preserved like a prom night corsage , behind glass, at their absolute peak. The killer is representative of the wishes and the hopes of their parents, which are often so far removed from the things that the teens themselves want that they might as well be dead if they take on the burden of these expectations. The invincible nature of being young versus the will of parents wanting them not to make the same mistakes that they did, or wish fulfiment is represented by the slasher, literally slashing them out of existence and leaving them forever young.

Meta fiction takes a twist then doubles back on itself as Stephen presents this tale as though we, the audience, are voyeurs,viewing it from a distance which has the effect of fiction cum cinema verite. It is presented as a screen play, divorcing the reader from reality as suspect after suspect is presented as the possible villain behind the mask.

However, ultimately, the identity of the person is not as important as following the rules of the game, grinding the killer to dust and then taking that breathing space for the inevitable sequel….

As Billy says-

”Movies don’t create psychos, movies make psychos more creative.’

The format and constant chopping through scenes made it at times difficult to read, and I had to go back and re-read several chapters to work out who was who, and what was what. That niggle aside, I found that Stephen’s paean to the slasher film was an enjoyable jaunt into the Blockbuster bargain bin ,where every method of teen disposable was painted loudly onto every page.

About the author…

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and six collections. He really likes werewolves and slashers. Favorite novels change daily, but ‘Valis’ and ‘Love Medicine’ and ‘Lonesome Dove’ and ‘It’ and ‘The Things They Carried’ are all usually up there somewhere. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. It’s a big change from the West Texas he grew up in. He’s married with a couple kids, and probably one too many trucks.