★★★★☆ Final Girls, by Mira Grant
"I'll have a love story with extra zombies and murders, please."
Final Girls
Mira Grant
“I’ll have a love story with extra zombies and murders, please.”
Warning: this review will be sort of spoilery. I will try to avoid spoiling anything that isn't spoiled in the publisher's blurb. (That's why I didn't check the spoiler box.) Normally I don't count anything in the blurb as a spoiler, but the blurb for Final Girls contains some big spoilers. So, proceed at your own risk.
Final Girls reminded me of Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. Everyone is familiar with the deplorable "It was all just a dream." trope, perhaps most famously used at the end of the movie version of The Wizard of Oz. At the end of the movie we discover that everything we have just spent a couple hours watching was a dream Dorothy had, and therefore has no real-world importance. This is a terrible way to end a book, so you will be glad to know that McGuire and Le Guin don't do that. Final Girls and Lathe of Heaven both turn the trope upside down. In both cases much of the action is in dreams, and we know that from the start. But there is no suggestion that it therefore lacks real-world significance. In Final Girls the dreams are deliberate illusions to which Jennifer Webb subjects her subjects as therapy. The whole idea is to produce real-world consequences, psychological ones.
Webb agrees to let reporter Esther Hoffman, who is a skeptic, investigate her organization. Hoffman, with some reluctance, agrees voluntarily to enter the simulation. Most of the novel recounts experiences in the simulation. Now, Mira Grant is the horror brand of Seanan McGuire, so you should not be surprised to learn that scary things happen in the dream. (And, indeed, the publisher's blurb speaks directly of "scenarios straight out of horror movies and nightmares".) At the same time, there are dire things going on outside the sim. (Once again, the publishers tip McGuire's hand, writing "Enter real-world threats just as frightening as those created in the lab.")
So we end up with a horror story both inside and outside the sim. The question is, will Jennifer and Esther survive, and will they survive intact? McGuire is not a safe author -- no one gets plot armor, so it would be rash to assume the answers are "yes and yes". I enjoyed the ending -- it was restrained, it didn't give too much away, but leaves it to us to imagine how things will play out in the long run.