Review: 'Not Your Final Girl' by Mikayla Randolph

A reunion of high school friends at a remote cabin is the perfect place for old feuds and buried memories to resurface, especially if they are all united by a dark deed. In Not Your Final Girl, we get to know a group of mostly deeply dislikeable characters and get to watch them be hunted down. The novel definitely has higher ambitions that being straightforward slasher-fun, but to what extent these ambitions actually work is probably up to the reader. Thanks to CLASH Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 05/05/2026
Publisher: CLASH Books

A feminist slasher novel fueled by female rage and haunted by gruesome murders, in this contemporary reimagining of Tess of the D’Urbervilles there can only be one Final Girl.

Darcy and her high school friends haven’t gathered together in seven years. After a tragic murder on prom night, the group graduated and never looked back. But when the lakeside cabin they spent their summers at is put up for sale, they reunite for one last hurrah.

Darcy hopes it will be an inspiring weekend that will help them all move on from their shared trauma. But Ashley, her biggest tormentor and the group’s manipulative self-appointed leader, is sure to stir up trouble. After a first day filled with jealousy, heartbreak, and unexpected guests, tensions are bursting, and the feud between Darcy and Ashley resurfaces.

The reunion takes a sinister turn when a masked killer slaughters one of their own. Cut off from the outside world with the death toll rising fast, the terrified friends turn on each other and uncover long buried secrets. Someone is seeking justice for their past betrayals and with friends like these no one is safe in this dark-femme slasher for fans of Maeve Fly by CJ Leede and The Indian Lake Trilogy by Stephen Graham Jones.

Can a slasher be feminist? Of course, everything can be feminist with the right kind of attention. But what is required of a slasher to earn the label "feminist"? The book does quote Carol Clover about the Final Girl at the front, a quote I recently used in an academic article as well, so that was fun for me but doth not, in and of itself, mark this as feminist. Feminism at its most basic is a political movement to win suffrage for women, to ensure that we are politically represented and equal in the eyes of the law. On a cultural level, feminism has sometimes been seen as making angels out of women who, in comparison to horrible men, can do no wrong. More recently, feminism has grown a little and emphasised that it is important that women are allowed to be loud and ugly, bad in different ways, not nice, not kind, not pretty, not, in short, perfect angels. I think that is the direction Not Your Final Girl goes into as well, wanting to show complex and complicated female characters and show how they deal with trauma and difficulty but in the context of a slasher. I've seen a number of people refer to this as a slasher-take on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles in their reviews, which surely comes from a marketing angle. I can see it, roughlyyyy, with some goodwill, but admittedly it's been a while since I've read Tess. In this book Mikayla Randolph is definitely interested in trauma responses, in victim blaming, in internalised misogyny, and more. I don't know if the explorations of those themes go quite deep enough for me and, depending on your mileage, each reader will have a different experience with it. 

Not Your Final Girl begins with a brief flash of the night where everything goes down, with two characters sprinting for their life and one being determined that they will be the final girl, not the other one. We then jump back a day or two to everyone arriving at the cabin. We have a whole set of characters: Darcy, the odd one out, Ashley, the high school bully, Su-Ah, Ashley's new girlfriend, Eliza, the younger sister of a previous friend, Kai, the novel's take on the jock, Lettie, who is now Insta-famous, Spencer, who has a crush on Lettie, and Nate, who used to date the previous friend and has now brought Eliza to this trip. They have come to the cabin, owned by Lettie's parents, because it will soon be sold, but what really unites them is what happened around prom in high school. There is an absence in their group, someone who is not there, and much of the novel's tension swirls around discovering what happened back then. As the tension rises, people begin to die in various interesting and gruesome ways as someone is clearly settling scores. But who? It did click for me in the end, mere seconds before the reveal, so I liked how Randolph set that up. In hindsight, there are clues, which is how it should be.

One thing I really enjoyed about Mikayla Randolph's writing is how she ratchets up the tension in the second half of the book. Some of the deaths and suspense scenes worked really well and felt chilling due to the small details Randolph introduced. In contrast, first half is very focused on setting up the various relationships between the characters based on their shared history and while this was interesting, it did also become a little bit of a slog. There is only so much high school drama you can read about before you wish these people would just grow up. A thing I wonder about is how the POVs were selected. We get chapters from Darcy, Ashley, Su-Ah, Eliza, and Kai. The latter feels mostly irrelevant to me, although the others do make some sense. Especially Su-Ah, as an outside perspective, was interesting and here the voice was also a little different in comparison to the others. Su-Ah reads and volunteers in a library (if I remember correctly) and so she frequently compares situations to stories. It was a nice way to individualise her chapters. I wonder why Lettie didn't qualify for a POV, though, and although I deeply disliked Nate, perhaps seeing events from his perspective would also have been interesting. Finally, I have one big issue with Not Your Final Girl which also feeds into my questioning the novel's feminist status. This isn't really a spoiler but skip to the next paragraph if you want to know nothing. It somehow stuck in my craw that the one character who was a bully, saw red, struggled with anger issues, and was presented as manipulative is Ashley, who is a Black woman. I fully see what Randolph was doing with her character and she builds in a little bit of awareness in there and the consequences of being Black in a slasher context, but it's not enough. I don't know if the character was always meant to be Black or if that was a decision later in the writing process, but especially since we get Ashley's POV, there should have been more discussion, or at least authorial awareness, of the impact of her ethnicity. Despite these issues, I was very intrigued by Not Your Final Girl and I'll keep an eye out for what Mikayla Randolph writes next.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

Not Your Final Girl didn't hit me as quite as revolutionarily feminist as the marketing would like, but Randolph shows a good skill at writing suspense and at crafting unlikeable characters in difficult situations.