I began writing Final Girls in June of 2005 in Nara, Japan during a three-year stint teaching English. The idea came to me after reading Judith Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters and watching the entire (at that time) Friday the 13th series with my flatmate and wondering why they couldn’t be bothered getting the continuity right. I decided that I would write my own cycle of horror movies, each with a different female protagonist, and tie them all together as neatly as I possibly could to form a single book. In order to make this somehow do-able, I decided to strip the prose back to probably painful bareness and allocate roughly 15,000 words per story. I continued the book in London, Ontario, Canada, where I lived with my then-girlfriend-now-wife as she worked on her speech pathology degree, and then finished it back home in Melbourne, Australia in April 2007.
Author Ken Bruen was one of the first people to read it. Anyone who knows
Ken will tell you how incredibly supportive and passionate he is and he immediately
gave me editors' names and addresses and told me to send it out with his
highest possible recommendation.
Nobody bit.
Ken and I then took a shot at a comic that got close but didn’t pan out
and I finally got on with writing shorts for the internet and resurrecting Crime Factory and doing a bunch of other stuff that will probably end up here at some
point too.
I dug Final Girls out a few months back and gave it a once-over. Looking back, it should’ve been no great surprise it went nowhere– a huge, confusing book made up of, frankly, bonkers ideas, faux hardboiled prose and (let’s be honest) some quite pretentious passages. It’s likely no reader's idea of solid craftsmanship. It’s likely it really sucks. In all truth, I probably shouldn’t even be posting it. I thought about editing it, cleaning it up, fixing some of it up (mostly the “The Filthy Workshop” section) and trying to do something with it again.
Then I read Stephen Graham Jones’ The
Last Final Girl. Sigh. And then Adam Cesare’s Tribesmen. Argh.
And now, right now, I literally just find out about the Jamie Lee Curtis show, incredibly similar in premise, and realise that this thing I wrote is essentially a dead file.
So, screw it. I present it here. In parts. Daily. The short prologue
first. Then the seven stories that make up the bulk of the book. Then the
epilogue. It’s untouched since 2007, but as I’m basically doing this to spitefully say “I
did it first, TV!” I don’t expect any readers, so let’s see this thing’s warts
in all their hairiness. Watch out for the first big chunk -- The Filthy Workshop. It’s admittedly not
great. I try too hard to be smart. Unfortunately,the book doesn’t really hold
together without it.
Enjoy. Or not.
Cam.
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