Hendrix wrote 2017’s Paperbacks from Hell and, along with Too Much Horror Fiction blogger Will Errickson, has partnered with Valancourt Books to reissue out-of-print classics such as David Fisher’s The Pack and Lisa Tuttle’s Familiar Spirit. While Hendrix’s other novels, including 2016’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism and 2020’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, often tap into classic horror movie tropes, the author has also become a champion for a different sort of historic horror: the genre fiction that flooded bookstore shelves and drugstore spinner racks in the 1970s and ’80s. “One of the big reference books for me,” Hendrix says, “was Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, which is her revisionist fairy tale book.” The writings of historian Marina Warner were also crucial in stringing together the bones of Hendrix’s story he cites Warner’s 1998 book No Go, the Bogeyman, a survey of male monsters in folklore and fairy tales, as a key influence. So besides the countless slasher movie references splattered throughout The Final Girl Support Group, there are shadows of a much older form of horror fiction: the fairy tales that, in Hendrix’s words, “bled into urban legends like The Hook and The Roommate and The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs” before metastasizing into horror movies such as Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street. “It's a good young girl who goes out into the dark woods and is warned not to do exactly what she does, and is attacked by this very predatory male figure, and has to defeat him through wits, not through a show of strength, and it's all about masks and disguises. “Little Red Riding Hood is the ur-slasher,” Hendrix tells Mental Floss. The two agreed that the roots of slasher movies go all the way back to fairy tales. Somewhere along the way, a conversation with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Only Good Indians and My Heart Is a Chainsaw, helped Hendrix clarify his vision. He finally began to work the idea into a novel in 2013, but it wasn’t until 2020 that he arrived at the version that hit bookstores in July 2021. It struck Hendrix as “the best idea the genre ever had,” and he meant to get a book out of it. One of the movie’s plot points has stuck with him ever since: the idea of a final girl from a previous franchise installment-Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy Thompson, in this case-showing up in a sequel to provide therapy services for a slasher’s other victims. Really, though, the book has been brewing since 1987, when Hendrix saw A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors in a South Carolina theater.

If you ask Grady Hendrix how long it took him to write his latest bestselling horror novel, The Final Girl Support Group, the official answer is seven years.

Bari wood the tribe