What to read after “The Last Girl” by Goldy Moldavsky: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Sloan and Cherry are the only counselors who survived a massacre at their summer camp. Months later, as Sloan's memory of that night returns, she starts to suspect that Cherry knows more about the attack than she admits.
Charity spends her summer playing the final girl at a camp that stages scenes from a classic slasher film. On the last weekend of the season her co-workers vanish, a body turns up, and the game becomes a real fight to survive the night.
Makani moved from Hawaii to a small Nebraska town and is still guarding a secret from her past. Then students at her high school are murdered one by one, each killing exposing something the victim hid, and the killer edges closer to her.
Ten teenagers are invited to a party on an isolated island, where a storm cuts them off and a recorded message promises revenge. As a slasher kills them one by one, Meg tries to work out who is behind it before nobody is left.
Ten years after surviving a massacre at a remote cabin in the woods, Quincy has built a quiet life out of pills, baking and careful routine. When another survivor from that group of women dies and a third turns up at her door, the past she cannot fully remember starts to close in again.
After her mother's death, Quinn moves with her father to Kettle Springs, a Missouri town split between resentful adults and bored teenagers. At the Founder's Day party in a cornfield, the town mascot, Frendo the Clown, begins killing students, and Quinn has to work out who can be trusted.
In the summer of 1983, thirteen-year-old Cyndi runs away from camp with three new friends and stumbles on an empty, well-kept water park. A masked killer is waiting there, and Cyndi has to become the kind of survivor she never expected to be.
As a teenager, Tessa was the only victim to survive the killer who buried girls in a Texas field of wildflowers, and her testimony sent a man to death row. Nearly twenty years later, fresh flowers appear near her home, and lawyers ask her to recover the memories she lost.
Lindsay survived a masked killer and is now her Texas town's celebrated final girl. When the killings start again, she recruits a new homecoming court of misfits and horror veterans, and the story turns into a knowing, blood-soaked riff on slasher rules.
Six women who each survived a famous mass murder meet in a therapist's group to cope with the aftermath. When one of them is killed, the group's most guarded member goes on the run to learn who is hunting them and why their old cases keep being reopened.
Jade, a high-school senior obsessed with slasher films, is sure a killer has come to her small Idaho town. Nobody believes her, so she pins her hopes on a new classmate she thinks is destined to be the final girl who survives. Her theory is also a way of outlasting her own life.
Every summer Cadence joins her wealthy family on their private island, where she and three cousins form an unbreakable group. The summer she is fifteen something goes wrong, and Cadence returns two years later with gaps in her memory that she is desperate to fill.
Fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett begins to act strangely, and her family turns first to a priest and then to a reality-television crew. Years later her younger sister tells the story of what happened in the house, though her memory is not entirely trustworthy.
Child psychologist Anna Fox lives alone, unable to leave her home, and spends her days watching her neighbours through a camera. When she sees something in the house across the street, no one believes her, and she is left to work out whether the danger is real or in her mind.
A British wireless operator and a pilot become close friends before a mission goes wrong over occupied France. Captured by the Gestapo, the operator is forced to write down what she knows, and her account of the two women slowly reveals more than it first seems.
Crime-writing teacher Ernest Cunningham joins his family at a snowbound mountain lodge for his brother's release from prison. When a body turns up, Ernest decides to follow the rules of Golden Age detective fiction to work out which of his relatives is responsible.
Rachel rides the same commuter train every day and invents stories about a couple she sees from the window, until she learns the woman has vanished. Her memory of the night in question is full of gaps, and she cannot tell how much of what she believes is real.
On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted tells a stranger that he wishes his cheating wife were dead. Lily calmly offers to help him plan it. As their murder scheme takes shape in Boston, each of the narrators hides a past the others know nothing about.
A woman with no money and a criminal record takes a live-in job cleaning for a wealthy family. The wife is cruel, the husband is kind, and a locked door upstairs keeps drawing her attention as the household's rules grow stranger.
An ambitious woman works her way into the life of a rich, seemingly perfect couple, planning to take the wife's place. The household she longs to join has secrets of its own, and neither woman is quite what she pretends to be.
A struggling writer is hired to finish the novels of an author who can no longer work. Sorting the family's papers in a remote house, she finds an unfinished memoir describing events too dark to be true, and must decide whom to believe.
Seven acting students at an elite Shakespeare conservatory are so close they share every role. When one of them is found dead during their final year, the friends must decide what story to tell the police. Ten years later, one of them finally explains what really happened.
As a child she helped put her father away for killing girls. Twenty years later she is a therapist about to marry, when young women in her town begin to disappear again and the old case follows her into the present.
A couple leave their sleeping baby at home while they attend a dinner party next door, checking on her every half hour. They return to an empty crib. The police suspect the parents, and both of them start learning what the other has been hiding.
Start with “The Last Girls Standing”, “You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight”, “There's Someone Inside Your House”: they are the closest to “The Last Girl” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “The Last Girl” these are Final Girl, Survival, Unreliable Narrator), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “The Last Girls Standing”, “You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight”, “There's Someone Inside Your House”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
