The Final Girl Support Group was disappointing

I was really looking forward to reading this but ended up being disappointed in the end. I expected something like a psychological thriller which explores the mental health struggles of characters that are survivors of what we would consider events right out of a slasher movie. Now, there are people from our own real world that have survived encounters with serial killers. We do have real life Final Girls (and Final Boys too!). Mary Vincent survived The Mad Chopper. Tracy Edwards (a Black male) survived Jeffrey Dahmer. Harrowing events, for sure. But quite different from surviving Freddy Kreuger, a supernatural entity. What can a therapist do for Nancy Thompson? I was looking forward to this book exploring that. It did not.

A lot of horror movie sequels open with the main character of the original attending a session with a psychiatrist or they talk about going to therapy at some point during the film. There's even that cliché scene of the protagonist waking up from a nightmare and immediately heading to the bathroom to open the medicine cabinet to get their prescription. They down the pills then stare into the mirror with a dark look. What did these characters go through between the original film and the sequel? What was their recovery like? I thought this book would be a deep dive into that. It was not.

I always knew the book would turn into a "sequel" of sorts. The final girls would be tested by a new killer(s). But the conflict with the new killer is pretty much the entire book. We don't get much of the final girls going to support at all. There is one meaningful session in the beginning and that's it. It all spirals out of control from there. By the end, I felt this was basically a novelization of an unproduced Scream sequel. Scream 5 spoilers:>! the motives of the killers in this book almost line up with the motives of the killers in Scream 5. Right down to boyfriend and girlfriend meeting online. The killers wanting to do something big to the established lore. The finale is basically the finale of a Scream movie right down to there being two killers (Roman Bridger being the one exception).!<I guess I wanted more drama with the final girls with their psychiatrist and with each other and that didn't happen in the way I had hoped. The book also hints at a supernatural aspect (Heather and the Dream King) but doesn't do much with it. I didn't need outright magicks but, again, I was hoping for an exploration of what horror movie characters do now knowing they live in a world with magic in it. How does that affect someone's worldview? The book does not really go there.

The plot was very disjointed. The main character erratic. I think I know the reason for this (we're supposed to believe they might be the killer) but I didn't fall for it. I soured on all the horror movie references early on. I've seen the Scream movies enough for that. Heather and the Dream King reminded me too much of Wes Craven's: New Nightmare so even that felt uninspired.

Overall, a really interesting concept but the execution left me wanting more.