Questions About Final Girls

by Riley Sager (Goodreads Author)

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Answered Questions (20)

In the scene in the park with Sam and Quincy, why did the author have to mention the skin color of the man? The seemingly stereotypical association that is implied is one Hispanics, African-Americans, and other ethnicities with dark skin should take offense to. The author had not mentioned ANYONE else's skin color up to that point in the story. Does the color of the guy's skin make any difference in the story?

Naz I actually thought the same while reading this, which is one of the parts I didn't like about this book (also including the silly ending/twist). No ot…moreI actually thought the same while reading this, which is one of the parts I didn't like about this book (also including the silly ending/twist). No other character's skin colour or ethnicities were included except the men in the park, it didn't sit right with me.(less)

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Did this seem like a predictable slasher movie with an unbelievable ending?

Hali Not really. The ending wasn’t unbelievable, it was just nonsensical.

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This question contains spoilers... (view spoiler)

Lisa

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[<spoiler>

tl;dr summary:

Coop thought the real Sam would be a strong, admirable Final Girl like he thinks Lisa and Quincy were. They are keeping it together and living what he considers good, moral lives. So he sought the real Sam out because he is fixated on the Final Girls. But because she sleeps with him sooner than the other two did, and doesn't act strong and perfect the way he wants her to, he flips his opinion on her and decides she's immoral, and he kills her for disappointing and disgusting him. So he doesn't kill the real Sam for any practical reason--he could have just left her alive after sleeping with her and she'd have never known he was a killer. He simply kills her because he is a serial killer and his urge to murder was triggered after coming to dislike her.

Long answer:

I think you can boil this down to Coop's misogynistic obsession with the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Not coincidentally, that's a common trope appearing in horror movies that often determines which women get to survive to the end of the movie. Coop, who decides which girls deserve to live or die, is this novel's personification of that trope where the women who have sex tend to die early in those movies, while the virginal good girl in white is often the one who survives. (Side note: The meta-horror movie Cabin in the Woods also really plainly lays out this trope in an entertaining way.)

Coop is attracted to yet disgusted by women he considers "whores": sexual, seemingly promiscuous, and therefore immoral and undeserving of life in his eyes. He wants to, and will, have sex with them. But paradoxically if they are too willing to sleep with him, that's part of why he considers them immoral. Meanwhile, he fixates in a different but still toxic way on women who he considers Madonna-esque: strong, virginal, virtuous, and therefore deserving of life. In other words, the epitome of the Final Girl trope in horror movies.

We see this explained when Coop describes the times he has the urge to kill (as opposed to when he kills for practical reasons to cover up his other crimes). The first strong urge to kill he has, though he resists it, is when he loses his virginity to the school "slut" and simultaneously wants to murder her for acting promiscuously. The first time does kill someone outside of the military, his victim is a stranger he gets a blowjob from (he might imply she is a prostitute, but hard to tell because his language is so derogatory). And his next two instances of murder are when he finds couples in the woods--Quincy's friends having sex, and a year previous to that another couple in a tent who we know less about (but based on Coop's other kills, we could surmise that this couple was having sex at the time too).

On the other hand, Coop does have sex with Lisa and Quincy, but he views them differently from these other women because in his opinion a) they are survivors and he admires them for that strength, and b) they didn't sleep with him right away, and therefore are not "sluts". He considers them still virtuous enough to deserve his twisted version of protection, worship, and love. He still decides to kill them both, of course, but considers this as different because it's in order to protect himself rather than to sate his personal urges.

He thought the real Sam would fall into this latter category of the virtuous worship-worthy woman. That is why he sought her out. He likely just planned to sleep with her as a proxy to Quincy and then keep his distance again, like he initially did with Lisa. But because she "threw herself at him" too soon, and didn't display enough markers of what he considers a strong and moral woman by showing adequate concern for Quincy or acting like a resilient survivor..he decides she must fall into the former category of immoral women who he has an urge to murder.

Of course, Coop is actually just holding all these women up to an impossible and self-contradictory rubric of goodness and badness that is ultimately just a justification of his own serial killing urges, a mask he wears in the mirror so he can keep considering himself a good person. And we see this good girl/bad girl trope taken apart by the end of the book. Quincy begins to accept that she doesn't have to suppress the trauma and messy parts of herself, that she herself doesn't have to wear the mask of a good person in order to justify the fact that she survived while other women didn't.

</spoiler> (hide spoiler)]

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Who does the author write under other than Riley Sanger? Anyone know?