Final Girl -- the last girl left alive in the syntax of the slasher-- traces the history of the femme fatale in a sequence of poems and stories that display the verve and wit readers have come to expect from Gottlieb. In Final Girl Gottlieb is the survivor, the one who remains to tell the story: what was done to others, what was done to her, what might yet be done to her.
Sexy and tart, dark and comic, low-down and high-hearted poems such as Suture, Slash, Vamp, Bride of Reanimator and The Babysitter Gottlieb identifies and articulates the desires, fears, traumas, both personal and social, out of which pop culture is made...and then she feeds pop culture back to itself.
Though the slasher flick is central, Gottlieb finds resonances in sources as disparate as the early American captivity narrative, queer and feminist film theory, and her own mother's death from breast cancer. Through such iconic American figures as Mary Rowlandson, Marilyn Monroe and Patty Hearst, Gottlieb delineates the ways in which we're betrayed by our cultural fantasies about abduction, gender, literature, pleasure, and transgression--and, in so doing, synthesizes the death and life of the American female.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 09/22/2003
ISBN: 9781887128971
Pages: 130
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.00h x 6.51w x 0.37d
Award: Lambda Literary Awards - Nominee
Award: Triangle Awards - Winner

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 11/17/2003 pg. 61
Library Journal 11/15/2003 pg. 71
Lambda Book Report 11/01/2004 pg. 16