Björn recenserade Final Girls av Riley Sager
None
3 stjärnor
Being alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods, cut off from all society, with no one around to help. To Americans, the source of thousands of horror stories; to Swedes, the perfect summer holiday.
The whole "final girl" concept - the one girl who survives the slasher movie, scarred and half-insane - has almost been deconstructed more than it's ever been played straight, much like the Cabin In The Woods setting. (In Cabin in the Woods, for one thing.) It made me expect more of a horror story than the psychological thriller Sager delivers. That said, what she does with the concept works very well; constantly blurring the line between the victim and survivor roles, between admiration and pity and fetishisation, between trauma and experience that's forced upon the women at the centre of the story. Can you truly love someone, with no ulterior motives, whose …
Being alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods, cut off from all society, with no one around to help. To Americans, the source of thousands of horror stories; to Swedes, the perfect summer holiday.
The whole "final girl" concept - the one girl who survives the slasher movie, scarred and half-insane - has almost been deconstructed more than it's ever been played straight, much like the Cabin In The Woods setting. (In Cabin in the Woods, for one thing.) It made me expect more of a horror story than the psychological thriller Sager delivers. That said, what she does with the concept works very well; constantly blurring the line between the victim and survivor roles, between admiration and pity and fetishisation, between trauma and experience that's forced upon the women at the centre of the story. Can you truly love someone, with no ulterior motives, whose trauma is publicly carrying the fantasies of an entire country?
So, OK, the ending. Maybe one twist too many. Sager spends so much time setting up how everyone can be hiding something or working from complex motivations, that when the whole thing finally turns into a slasher movie towards the end and all questions get answered it's bound to be a letdown. Maybe it could have used some of that ambiguity the rest of the novel uses so well. Still, a perfect novel to read in one long go in the summer sun.