Chapter Summary
Chapter 1: “The Final Girl Support Group”
Lynnette Tarkington wakes in her apartment and, after forcing herself to exercise and shower, has her first panic attack of the day. She is always on high alert. She learns from the news that there’s a new “Final Girl”—16-year-old Stephanie Fugate—who survived a mass murder at Camp Red Lake. Lynnette knows Stephanie can never be happy again because Lynnette is also a Final Girl. She describes how one becomes a Final Girl—when real life mimics a horror movie where the killer takes out people one by one until he gets to the one girl who didn’t think it was a good idea to be there in the first place. That girl survives because she’s in good shape and somehow kills the killer. “Ever wonder what happens to those Final Girls?” (5), Lynnette asks. They end up in a support group.
There used to be seven Final Girls in the group, until Chrissy betrayed them all. Lynnette is worried about Adrienne. Camp Red Lake was where Adrienne became a Final Girl; it’s also where Adrienne has set up a retreat for survivors of violence.
Lynnette leaves for group, noting that this is the only time she leaves her apartment. She always makes sure she knows how to escape and has set up her life to avoid anything unexpected: “I don’t like risk” (6). She wears running shoes keeps her hair short and her clothes tight so she can’t be grabbed, and always carries a box cutter, razor, and pepper spray. Lynnette gathers what she needs, and leaves for group.
Chapter 2: “The Final Girl Support Group II”
Lynnette sees that four other Final Girls showed up for group: Dani, Marilyn, Heather, and Julie. Heather is complaining to Dr. Carol that there are no snacks at the meeting. Adrienne isn’t there, and they assume it’s because of the killings at Camp Red Lake. Marilyn questions whether they need the group, as perhaps they should stop focusing on the past.
Details about the women are revealed. Marilyn married a rich Republican politician. Julia, who uses a wheelchair, married her physiotherapist, and he stole all the money she’d made through the franchise of her story. Heather is snarky and recovering from addiction. Dani announces she’s planning to stop coming to group to be home with her wife Michelle who is dying from cancer.
Lynnette assumes they’ve kept group going for 16 years because they all assume Heather would fall apart without it, but Lynnette begins to cry at the thought of group ending—it provides her only contact with other people and gives her a reason to leave her apartment. However, when Lynnette mentions the need to stay together for Heather, the room grows uncomfortable. Julia says they kept going for Lynnette, not Heather. Heather piles on, accusing Lynnette: “You’re not even a real Final Girl” (19). Just then, Marilyn finally looks at her phone, which has been ringing, and learns that Adrienne is dead. Lynnette knows this means her monster got her, and any of them can be next.
Chapter 3: “The Final Girl Support Group 3-D”
The women leave group separately. Lynnette is on high alert again. She considers, “Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female” (24). She believes she can be killed any day just for being a woman.
Final Girls haven’t just survived one mass murder—they’ve also lived through their killers coming back a second time. When Adrienne was a counselor at Camp Red Lake, nine of her friends were murdered the night the counselors went to the camp early to prepare for the campers’ arrival. The killer had been Bruce Volker, the camp cook, who was out for revenge because 20 years earlier some counselors were having sex instead of watching his son Teddy, who drowned. Bruce claimed the killer was Teddy back from the dead, but the killings stopped when Adrienne beheaded Bruce. Later, it was determined that there was no son named Teddy. It was Bruce, a lonely sociopath and pedophile. On her bus ride home, Lynnette grieves Adrienne, who always had time for her. Lynnette’s apartment has a cage she designed and built for extra security:
“Each of us responded to our trauma differently. Dani became self-sufficient, Adrienne got into self-help, Marilyn married up and buried her head in the sand, Heather got high, Julia went activist. Me? I learned how to protect myself” (27).
She’s focused solely on staying alive, which she believes is due to her “willpower and self-control” (28). She greets her plant “Fine,” the one thing she cares for, gets her gun, and examines her apartment for intruders.
Adrienne’s story became the Summer Slaughter movie franchise. She got back the rights to the story, setting an important precedent for all the Final Girls. All the proceeds from the Summer Slaughter movies went to the Adrienne Butler Fund for the Prevention of Violence against Women. Adrienne turned Camp Red Lake into a retreat for survivors of violence. She was generous and protective of all the Final Girls.
Now, Adrienne was seemingly killed by Bruce Volker’s nephew Christophe, who was three when Adrienne killed his uncle. Christophe was angry that his family got no money from the movies that were partly about his family. He killed the staff at Camp Red Lake, and then went to Adrienne’s house, where he placed his uncle’s decapitated head in her refrigerator and killed her with an ice pick.
Someone knocks on Lynnette’s door. Lynnette is terrified, but then she sees that it’s Julia and she decides to ignore the door, angry that anyone knows where she lives. Later, there’s another knock. Lynnette sees that this time it’s Julia and the Ghost—the killer Julia escaped, whose story became the Stab movies. Lynnette knows she has to help Julia because of an unspoken agreement between the Final Girls to be there for each other when their monsters come back.
Chapter 4: “The Final Girl Support Group IV: Return of the Final Girls”
Lynnette shoots at the Ghost, but Julia reveals that in the Ghost costume is actually journalist Russell Thorn—Julia had him dress up so Lynnette would open the door. The mesh in her cage was supposed to let bullets through, but it didn’t, so Russell is fine. Julia tells Lynnette that someone is writing a book about group, and Russell believes Christophe Volker knew about it. Julia thinks it’s Heather. A book is dangerous because it provides too much information to the monsters’ fans, who think of the Final Girls as obstacles for their heroes.
Julia is a Final Girl because her high school boyfriend and college boyfriend dressed up in the same ghost costume to kill her classmates. Julia killed them both. When she pushed her college boyfriend out a window, she fell with him and now needs to use a wheelchair to get around.
Russell opens the curtain and sees police swarming the street. Then, someone starts shooting into the apartment. Russell tries to escape, but he’s hit and goes down. Julia is hit too. Lynnette runs too. She’s ashamed to leave Fine and Julia behind.
Chapter 5: “The Final Girl Support Group’s New Nightmare”
Lynnette feels like a failure. She failed Julia and Fine, and she failed to protect herself after all her efforts. She calls Dr. Carol and asks for help. Dr. Carol picks up Lynnette in her car and takes her back to her house, where she lives with her two sons, eight-year-old Pax and 20-something Skye. Once there, Dr. Carol learns that Heather’s halfway house burned down. The authorities think Heather started the fire.
In a room in Dr. Carol’s basement, Lynnette considers who might be after the Final Girls. Final Girl fans are one possibility. But more terrifyingly, it could be all the Final Girls’ monsters: Ricky and Billy Walker, Nick Shipman, the Hansens, the Ghost, Teddy Volker, and the Dream King.
Chapter 6: “The Final Girl Support Group VI: The Next Generation”
Lynnette wakes up at Dr. Carol’s house. Eight-year-old Pax comments, “Nice rack,” and he and his brother Skye laugh at a T-shirt featuring Lynnette’s story, which they’ve found while researching who she is online. Lynnette offers to show Skye her scars, and he asks her what the pain of getting them was like.
Dr. Carol gets a call that Dani is in custody; the police reopened her case and told her to come in for questioning because someone had confessed to the crime in her story, but she refused to leave her dying wife Michelle. When the officers wouldn’t leave, Dani shot into the air, so they tasered her and took her to jail. Then they moved Michelle to hospice.
In the 1980s, Dani’s older brother Nick enjoyed killing animals and other things that were smaller than him. When Dani was seven, he hurt their babysitter badly enough that he got sent to a facility. Her parents took her to visit him a few years later, but it was so upsetting for Dani to see Nick so incapacitated by anti-psychotic medication that she never went back, which she regrets. When she was 17, a Halloween storm allowed facility inmates to escape. A man wearing a mask and wielding a knife attacked Dani; she assumed it was Nick coming back to see the sister who had abandoned him. She stabbed the attacker with his own knife, and the police shot him many times, but they couldn’t find his body. Later that night, after killing many more people, Nick found Dani at the hospital where they’d taken her, and she beat him to death with a tire iron. Nick’s fans spread rumors that the masked man was probably Harry Peter Warden, another escaped inmate. This terrified Dani, who was afraid she’d killed her brother for no reason—maybe he was just coming to check on her as her brother, and was still woozy from the antipsychotics.
Lynnette wonders whether someone knew that mistakenly killing Nick was Dani’s biggest fear from a book like the one Julia had suggested was out there.
Lynnette goes to Skye’s room, catching him masturbating. He’s embarrassed, but agrees to go with her to her apartment to get a hard drive from her computer. She looks through some files in Dr. Carol’s office and finds one on Stephanie Fugate. Stephanie was at Camp Red Lake because a few years earlier her tennis coach had been poisoning players, and Stephanie survived the murder spree. Lynnette resolves not to let another individual being attacked go unprotected. Before Lynnette and Skye leave, Lynnette bribes Pax not to tell his mother about it by giving Pax a hundred dollars for a comic book he drew.
Chapter 7: “The Final Girl Support Group VII: Son of the Final Girls”
On the way to her apartment, Lynnette tells Skye about how people worship monsters. They collect “murderabilia,” which includes the killers’ belongings or mementos from their killings. When Skye suggests she’s stuck in her past, Lynnette responds:
None of us have to be defined by the worst thing that happened to her. Unfortunately, those things have a bad habit of coming back and trying to kill us again. After a while, you start to realize that your life isn’t the thing that happens between the monsters, your life is the monsters” (89).
There is no escape from the past for her because there is always threat of the monsters coming back. She has to live this way if she wants to stay alive.
They sneak past the media and law enforcement parked outside her apartment. Inside, she finds Fine, the plant, and then opens a hidden panel in the wall where her real computer is—the one the cops got is a dummy. Skye determines someone installed software that allows them to remotely operate her computer. Lynnette is upset with herself for having been careless, especially because her computer has her book on it. She has Skye take her to Bel Air and promise not to tell his mother. On the way there, Lynnette notices that Skye looks like Tommy; she feels sorrow about Tommy and what might have been.
Chapter 8: “The Final Girl Support Group VIII: Night of the Final Girls”
A little while ago, journalist Russell Thorn tried to blackmail Lynnette when he discovered that she writes romance novels under a pseudonym: To prevent him from going public with this information, he demanded she co-author a book about the Final Girls, a book she imagined titling The Final Girl Support Group. Refusing to go along, Lynnette instead wrote the whole book herself, but realized she couldn’t publish it because it would betray the women in the group. She didn’t want to throw it out, though, so she simply left it on her computer.
Lynnette approaches Marilyn’s house and puts Fine in the bushes. There is extra security. She realizes Marilyn is having a party.
Years earlier, when Marilyn, her brother, and three friends went to make sure Marilyn’s grandfather’s grave hadn’t been dug up—something that was rumored to be happening in the place where he was buried—they ran into a backwoods family of former slaughterhouse owners, the Hansens, who turned out to be murderous cannibals. The Hansens brutally murdered everyone except Marilyn. A year later, the surviving Hansens showed up at a radio station where Marilyn had a DJ job. She once again survived.
Lynnette tries to get into the party, but a security guard stops her and wrestles her to the ground when she tries to fight back. Security gets Marilyn, who is annoyed to see Lynnette there. Lynnette screams, so Marilyn has no choice but to send Lynnette to the guest cottage and to promise she’ll arrive later to talk. The guards take Lynnette to the cottage, where she finds Heather.
Chapter 9: “The Final Girl Support Group IX: Final Girl vs. Final Girl”
Heather doesn’t want Lynnette there—she’s worried Lynnette will ruin Heather’s new luxurious hiding spot. When Lynnette warns that something dangerous is happening to the Final Girls, Heather tells Lynnette everyone pities her because she’s so disordered: “[Y]ou can barely walk through a door without having a nervous breakdown and you’re going to help anyone? […] Out of everyone, you are the absolute fucking worst at letting go of the past” (116). Lynnette retorts that they all have to look out for each other.
Suddenly, Lynnette’s story is on the news. Officer Garrett P. Cannon announces on TV that the police have new information on the Silent Night Slayings.
Heather tries to escape, but the security guards hold her back. Marilyn arrives, tells the women to stay put, and has food delivered to the room. Marilyn explains that paparazzi followed Lynnette to her party. Lynnette tries to get Marilyn to believe that killers are coming for the Final Girls, but Marilyn believes everyone else is safe—Dani is protected in jail and Julia has security posted in the hospital. Meanwhile, Heather and Lynnette both have warrants out for their arrest. Lynnette asks about Michelle in hospice. She convinces the other women that they need to make sure she’s safe.
Chapter 10: “TFGSG X”
The three women spring the dying Michelle from hospice, relying on Marilyn’s savviness and a small taser to a guard’s crotch. Their plan is to take Michelle to Dani’s ranch, but in the car, they realize they don’t know where the ranch is, and Michelle is too far gone to tell them. Marilyn drives to a park, where they wheel Michelle onto the grass so she can die outside in nature. Michelle dies. They ask an old man to stay with her body.
As they are leaving, Garret and other cops show up. Heather called him to arrest Lynnette—both Lynnette and Heather have warrants out, and this would give Heather a way to escape. Shrugging about the betrayal, Heather says, “The rest of us are survivors […] You were always just a victim” (144). Lynnette sees that Heather offered up Lynnette to save herself, just like Lynnette did to Julia during the shooting.
Chapter 11 : “The Final Girl Support Group XI: Better Watch Out!”
At the police station, detectives ask Lynnette whether she had sex with the Santa Claus Killer. Lynnette demands a lawyer, realizing that she’s being accused of having a physical relationship with Ricky Walker, one of her monsters. Billy Walker, Ricky’s brother and her second monster, claims there’s evidence she did.
Lynnette remembers the Christmas Eve when it happened. Her parents went out for dinner, and her boyfriend Tommy came over, so she sent her younger sister Gillian upstairs so they could be alone. She and Tommy were fooling around on the pool table when Ricky Walker, dressed as Santa Claus and carrying an axe, rang the doorbell. Ricky murdered Tommy, pulled off Lynnette’s shirt, and impaled her on the rack of antlers on the wall. As the antlers kept her from bleeding out, Lynnette played dead for 10 hours, watching Ricky murder her sister and parents. The next morning, Ricky murdered the first cop on the scene. Garrett came in next; he shot Ricky, who jumped through the sliding glass doors and fell over the railing onto the ground, where his head split in two.
Garrett stayed with Lynnette as she recovered in the hospital. He protected her and was her voice during interviews; soon, she fell in love with him. Eventually, Lynnette moved in with foster parents, but, on the first Christmas she was willing to have Christmas decorations again, Ricky’s brother Billy, who blamed Lynnette for what happened to Ricky, escaped his psych ward in a Santa suit and came for Lynnette. Hearing of Billy’s escape, Garrett made sure cops were stationed at Lynnette’s foster parents’ home, but Billy went in the back. He killed her foster parents, and then beat Lynnette’s head so badly she needed a metal plate. When a police officer rang the doorbell to use the bathroom, Billy shot him and ran out the back. When the police found Billy 24 hours later, Garrett shot him, but purposely avoided killing him—live killers were better for book deals.
Lynnette and Garrett became sexually involved, even though he had a wife and kids. Lynnette became completely dependent on him. She allowed him to handle her life, including selling her story, but when she panicked during a showing of the first Slay Bells movie, Garrett stopped contacting her as often and eventually disappeared entirely. Lynnette was devastated, but slowly she learned how to keep herself safe alone. Now, she feels guilty for her part in what happened: “in my heart I know I deserve to be in prison. In my heart, I know I deserve to be in Hell” (160).
Chapter 12: “The Final Girl Support Group XII: Hellbound”
Lynnette stays in the same holding cell where the police put copies of the letters Billy said he found from Lynnette to Ricky Walker. She feels that she deserves to be here; once released to await trial, she expects a fan will kill her for fame, even though she’s a “not-quite” Final Girl.
Lynnette feels responsible for the murders of people she loved because after she became pen pals with foster care kid Ricky Walker in fifth grade for a school assignment, she shared with Ricky that her father yelled all the time and that she sometimes she wished her parents were dead. Later, she gave him her address so they could run away together—that’s why he came to her house and killed her family. Lynnette also feels guilty for not saving anyone except herself: “The other ones in group fought back and killed their monsters, but me? I just hung on those antlers like a piece of meat. I just lay there on the linoleum getting my skull pulped” (164).
Dr. Carol visits. She feels deeply betrayed by Lynnette’s book. Someone emailed a copy to everyone in group—all the women are furious. Dr. Carol claims to have printed out the entire book, but the stack of paper she is carrying is too thick for what Lynnette actually wrote. That plus the weird tone in Dr. Carol’s voice makes Lynnette suspect that Dr. Carol is actually the killer.
Lynnette looks at the letters that purport to say she had sex with Ricky Walker. The Holly Hobbie stationery isn’t the kind she used—the letters have been forged.
A young cop with a broken hand offers her a granola bar as consolation for not being able to let her use the phone. Then, suddenly, he tries to kill her by cutting off her air supply. Garrett saves her just before she blacks out.
Chapter 13: “The Final Girl Support Group XIII: The Final Sacrifice”
Garrett takes Lynnette out of the police station and tells her they’re taking a road trip back to Utah, where she’s from. In the car, he talks about the Slay Bells movies, while Lynnette considers Dr. Carol’s motive.
Garrett won’t let Lynnette eat even though she’s hungry. He reveals that he knows every one of her stalkers, including the superfan officer that tried to kill her—Garrett actually set that attack up so the LAPD would understand they weren’t equipped to protect her in jail. Lynnette assumes that Garrett is going to kill her, but instead he sets her free. He knows the Ricky Walker letters are fake—there is nothing to gain from bringing in new information about her case. He reports that when he checked the visitor sheets for Billy Walker, he saw that Chrissy Mercer—the former seventh member of the support group—had visited Billy many times.
Garrett tells her to give him a black eye to make it look like he was jumped; then she can go to a restaurant and call a cab. Instead, she knees him in the balls and takes his car.
Chapter 14: “The Final Girl Support Group XIV: The New Blood”
Lynnette decides to kidnap Stephanie to keep her safe. At Stephanie’s house, she introduces herself as Dr. Laura Newbury and tells the Fugates that she works with Dr. Carol, whom they’ve been trying to reach. She tells them that Stephanie is a Final Girl, and that they need to keep her safe. Stephanie comes downstairs. She knows who Lynnette is, but doesn’t let on. Lynnette tells Stephanie that she needs to go with Lynnette to stay safe.
Just then Dr. Carol arrives, concerned Stephanie might be in danger because of one of her patients. Lynnette convinces Stephanie to run out the back of the house with her. She tells Stephanie that Dr. Carol is trying to kill them.
Chapter 15: “The Final Girl Support Group XV: Dream Warriors”
Stephanie’s mother calls. Lynnette tells Stephanie to answer and let her mother know she’s okay, and then Lynnette takes the phone. Dr. Carol comes on and tells her she needs to stop this. Lynnette warns that if they call the cops or media, she’ll kill Stephanie. Once off the phone, she reassures Stephanie that this was just an empty threat. Lynnette calls Marilyn on a burner phone to let her know about Dr. Carol, but Marilyn won’t listen—she is still angry because of the book. Then Lynnette calls Dani, but Dani won’t listen either.
Lynnette asks Stephanie why she came so easily with her. Stephanie explains that Lynnette reminds her of her best friend who was killed. Stephanie’s focus has entirely changed since surviving the massacre at Camp Red Lake. Lynnette has Stephanie send an anonymous message to Chrissy saying she has “murderabilia” to sell.
Chapter 16: “The Final Girl Support Group XVI: Season of the Final Girls”
Lynnette and Stephanie try to meet with Chrissy to ostensibly sell her “murderabilia,” but when Chrissy recognizes Lynnette, she refuses to meet them. They follow her car to her house in the woods and wait. After a while, Lynnette takes out her gun, tells Stephanie to look for her if she doesn’t come back in an hour, and starts making her way toward the creepy cabin. Stephanie doesn’t appreciate being left with no weapons.
Chapter 17: “The Final Girl Support Group XVII: Bride of the Final Girls”
Lynnette comes across dolls hanging from branches, a toy cemetery, abandoned appliances, and a windchime made of screwdrivers. Suddenly, a man assaults her from behind, pulling her by the hair into a house. She uses her box cutter to cut her hair to free herself. She runs to get her gun and is about to shoot him when Chrissy appears and tells her to stop. The man is Chrissy’s boyfriend Keith. Chrissy sends him away, annoyed that Lynnette wasted her entire afternoon with a fake transaction.
The Final Girls support group considers Chrissy, who became a Final Girl at a homecoming massacre, a traitor because she champions the killers’ rights. Dr. Carol theorizes that Chrissy switched loyalties because her monster was her godfather, but Lynnette thinks she’s acting erratic and dangerous.
In Chrissy’s cluttered home, the women discuss their different beliefs around what happened to them. Lynnette thinks it’s simple. But Chrissy likes theorizing her suffering, which she views as a “shamanistic vision quest that uses an ordeal to lead us inward on a journey of spiritual discovery and eventual synthesis and peace” (231). She has taken the horrific thing that happened to her and turned it into a self-actualizing opportunity.
Chrissy visits Billy Walker regularly and commissions his art for customers. Lynnette tells Chrissy that someone is using Chrissy to communicate, but Chrissy knows more than Lynnette thinks. Lynnette was “always more of an unfinished victim than a real Final Girl” (234), but she’s finally about to have an opportunity to be real: Chrissy knows what the numbers in the email sent to the support group mean. They walk through Chrissy’s museum to get to the computer.
The museum’s first room represents what happened to Dani. It has the knife Nick used to kill, and the tire iron with which Dani killed him.
Chapter 18: “The Final Girl Support Group XVIII: Curse of the Final Girls”
As they walk through Chrissy’s organized and cataloged museum, Chrissy and Lynnette argue about who the monsters are and why they do what they do. Lynnette sees them as psychopaths. Chrissy sees their behavior as metaphysical: They see themselves in other people, so they kill those who mirror their own weaknesses. In the end, there is just the monster and the Final Girl—two opposing forces of life and death: “Even destruction can’t unmake creation. That primal feminine impulse, that procreative urge cannot be undone” (242).
They walk into Adrienne’s room, with items from the original 1978 Camp Red Lake murders. Chrissy philosophizes about the difference between these massacres and other murders. Horror is more meaningful because of the Final Girls. The Final Girl and the monster are opposite sides of the same coin: She is loud, fast, and resourceful; he is slow, silent, and can only kill. She tries to save her friends, and he’s alone. When she kills him, she puts him out of his misery and frees them both.
Heather’s room is more horrifying than Lynnette imagined, since Heather was part of a supernatural massacre. Lynnette’s room is still empty because Lynnette hasn’t gone down the Final Girl path yet. Julia’s room is made up of mirrors and the items from The Ghost’s murders. Chrissy theorizes that each Final Girl has a stock role, such as jock or cheerleader; Lynnette’s role will be “Final Girl of the Final Girls” (247). To Chrissy, monsters serve a purpose. They’re the threshold that all must cross, and the thing people fear most. They bring about people’s metaphorical deaths so they can transform into who they must become.
Chrissy shows Lynnette emails from someone named “Orchomenus.” Orchomenus is ostensibly interested in Billy’s art, but has actually been communicating with Billy through numbers at the end of each email. Billy’s responses include numbers too. The numbers correspond to page and line numbers from The Diary of Anne Frank, the real-life autobiography of a young Jewish girl who died at the hands of the Nazis in the Holocaust during World War II. Orchomenus and Billy use this book because every prison has a copy. Chrissy claims Orchomenus forged Lynnette’s letters to Billy. Chrissy believes Orchomenus is Dr. Carol. Lynnette is devastated by the confirmation of what she feared.
Suddenly, the women realize that Keith has found Stephanie outside.
Chapter 19: “The Final Girl Support Group XIX: Final Girl’s Revenge”
Keith is holding a bloodied and limp Stephanie in the living room. Chrissy laughs. She wants to let Keith have Stephanie because he feeds on murdering. While Keith prepares to skin Stephanie, Lynnette runs to the car, starts it, and crashes it into the house. The crash kills Chrissy. Lynnette finds Stephanie, but just then Keith suddenly grabs Lynnette’s ankle from beneath a pile of drywall. She stomps on his arm and stabs it with a piece of splintered wood over and over until he lets go. Lynnette carries Stephanie out while Keith comes after them. The car doesn’t start until the last second.
Lynnette gets Stephanie stitches for her scalp, and then takes them to a Motel 6. Lynnette is devastated that she killed another Final Girl. She is horrified that she murdered someone, and she is determined to never kill again, no matter what. She calls Skye on Stephanie’s phone and tells him to run, but he explains that Dr. Carol is taking him and Pax to Sagefire. Lynnette calls Julia, who tells her that Dr. Carol is picking up everyone from the support group to keep them safe because they believe Lynnette has had a mental health crisis and is dangerous. Lynnette begs Julia to go somewhere with the other Final Girls to be safe from Dr. Carol and to get Skye and Pax too, if they can.
When Stephanie wakes, Lynnette finally looks at the comic book she bought from Pax. It features a violent superhero named “Sky Man.” As the crayoned Sky man cuts off the heads of six women, he says, “I kill all the Last Ladies” (270). Lynnette realizes that Skye must be the killer: He sent the emails sent to Chrissy from Dr. Carol’s account, and he got hold of Lynnette’s book. Lynnette calls Julia many times to warn her, but Julia doesn’t answer.
Chapter 20: “The Final Girl Support Group XX: The Final Chapter”
Lynnette brings her car to a mechanic and convinces him to give her a loaner. She tries calling Skye, but it goes to voicemail. She starts to call Garrett, but Stephanie stops her—Garrett won’t believe Lynnette because her theory is based on a little kid’s drawings. Lynnette is sure she’s right about Skye, but then realizes that she spoke just as adamantly about Dr. Carol.
They stop at a rest area so Stephanie can pee. As she comes back to the car, Stephanie gets off the phone with someone. Lynnette muses that her entire life has been wasted on being scared and trying to stay alive. The only thing she can do now is to keep Stephanie safe. Lynnette is determined to not let more Final Girls get made. She wants all the killing to stop.
They decide to go to Dani’s ranch.
Chapter 21 : “The Final Girl Support Group XXI: The Final Chapter II”
As Lynnette and Stephanie approach Dani’s ranch, they see smoke. They get closer and see Dani throwing all of her belongings into a fire. Dani attacks Lynnette out of anger about the book. When Lynnette warns her about Skye, Dani tells her the rest of the group went to Camp Red Lake. Lynnette begs Dani to come with them, and Dani agrees.
Chapter 22: “The Final Girl Support Group XXII: The Final Nightmare”
Dani explains that the Final Girls also took Skye with them, based on Lynnette’s warnings.
Before Lynnette, Dani, and Stephanie get to Camp Red Lake, Dani pulls over to pee. Suddenly, Stephanie hits Lynnette in the head with a sledgehammer, and Lynnette falls out of the car. As Dani comes out of the bushes, Stephanie runs her over with the car, but Dani somehow evades the attack. Horrified, Lynnette realizes she brought Stephanie right to the Final Girls.
Dani pops up out of nowhere, punches Stephanie over and over again, and then goes to help Lynnette. But Stephanie isn’t done. She hits Dani with the gun, and they wrestle until Dani gets away. As Lynnette plays dead like she did with Ricky Walker, Stephanie drives off toward Camp Red Lake.
Chapter 23: “The Final Girl Support Group XXIII: Resurrection”
Lynnette forces herself to climb the hill to the camp. She hears Adrienne’s voice telling her to keep moving, to get up, and to not let Adrienne’s sacrifice go to waste. At camp, Lynnette goes into the dining area and finds Julia hiding in a storage closet—Julia went to get sunscreen for everyone at the lake. They find Dani facedown, but breathing. As Lynnette and Julia figure out somewhere safe to put Dani, they see a man with an automatic rifle. Lynnette panics, but Adrienne’s voice urges her on.
Lynnette suddenly remembers the camp has a panic cabin—a secure enclosure that will keep them safe. They find the other Final Girls, but after the women go into the cabin, Lynnette decides to go back out the trap door. She will be a decoy so the rest can get free. Lynnette gets to the Wellness Barn and breaks open the door. Pushing herself through pain, she comes to the hydrotherapy room. Skye is there, but by this point, Lynnette doesn’t feel she has anything left. She is about to give up when suddenly, Heather hits him hard in the back of the neck with the lid of a toilet tank, knocking him out.
Heather and Lynnette determine that Skye is still alive and decide not to kill him because he’s still Dr. Carol’s son. Just then, Stephanie sneaks up and puts a shotgun to the back of Heather’s neck. Stephanie doesn’t care about Lynnette, but killing Heather will make Stephanie and Skye famous. After hearing about how Stephanie and Skye met, a shocked Lynnette tries to make Stephanie see what’s really going on: “He groomed you […] You’ll be just another victim of a powerful, manipulative male” (324). Stephanie will only be a footnote, while all the glory will go to Skye. Calmly, no longer frightened at all, Lynnette challenges Stephanie to kill Skye. When Stephanie hesitates, Lynnette attacks Stephanie and holds her down. Stephanie begs Lynnette to kill her, but Lynnette waits until law enforcement shows up and puts cuffs on Skye and Stephanie.
Chapter 24: “The Final Girl Support Group XXIV: A New Beginning”
The Final Girls visit Stephanie in prison. They are all famous again, though Dr. Carol has decided to take a long leave of absence from the group. Dani is using a wheelchair now, so Julia gives her some tips on getting around. Marilyn has put Lynnette’s plant Fine in her yard, and it’s flourishing.
Lynnette says Adrienne was the best of them. Marilyn agrees—Adrienne never stopped caring, so she saved all of them. Lynnette ran into Garrett in front of the prison. He offered to work together again, but Lynnette refused.
Stephanie arrives to the visiting room. She explains more of her story: After Skye spent years seducing and grooming her, Stephanie gave Skye all the information he wanted about Camp Red Lake. He planned to kill everyone his mother cared about and leave her career shattered. Seeing that Stephanie is another victim and survivor of a monster, Lynnette welcomes her to the Final Girl support group.
