What to read after “The Last Girls Standing” by Jennifer Dugan: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
New at an elite New York school, Rachel finds a place in the Mary Shelley Club, a secret society of horror-movie fans who stage elaborate Fear Tests on chosen victims. Then a sinister masked figure appears, and the past Rachel has been hiding returns to threaten the new life she has built.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Each morning Christine wakes with no memory of her life, and each day her husband explains who she is. When she starts a diary at a doctor's suggestion, she finds entries in her own hand that contradict what he tells her, and that suggest her past holds a crime.
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.
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears from a rented house and her husband Nick becomes the prime suspect. Two narrators tell very different versions of the same marriage.
In a quiet suburb, a young mother vanishes while out running, and weeks later another woman and her six-year-old daughter disappear nearby. Eleven years on, the daughter suddenly returns, and what she brings back unsettles everyone who stayed behind.
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.
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.
Amber Reynolds is in a coma, though she can hear the people around her and cannot move or speak. In her mind she sifts through the days before the accident and the diary entries from years earlier that do not quite match the life she thought she had.
A husband and wife in a Florida suburb look like an ordinary couple, but they share a secret pastime that has to stay hidden. As the double life grows harder to manage, the narrator finds the person he knows best is the one he trusts least.
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.
Years after her mother and sisters were killed and her teenage brother was convicted, Libby Day is approached by a group of true-crime enthusiasts who believe he is innocent. Short of money, she agrees to ask questions, and the answers force her to revisit what she remembers of that night.
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.
A nanny takes a live-in post at a remote smart house in the Scottish Highlands, hoping for a fresh start. The children are troubled, the technology watches everything, and her employers are rarely home. Told in letters from prison, it asks who is really to blame.
What should I read after “The Last Girls Standing”?
Start with “The Last Girl”, “You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight”, “The Final Girl Support Group”: they are the closest to “The Last Girls Standing” 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 Girls Standing” 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 Girl”, “You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight”, “The Final Girl Support Group”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
