Rebecca Levene

A group of international students gets far more than they had bargained for during their deadly holiday excursion through Europe. Original.

End of the Line

Geoffrey Froggatt

** spoiler alert **
           The Final Destination movies got me into horror, so when I heard there were novels, I tried my best to get my hands on them, despite their rarity. As every novel in the book series are separate stories, I chose to read this one first. A word of warning: I also spoil the events of Final Destination 3 in this review. A group of international students are expecting to live the wild life on a cultural exchange trip to New York, but soon find themselves the only survivors of a horrific subway crash. A young doctor treating the victims tells the students that they were meant to have died in the wreck but they just dismiss it as an idle fantasy. When the group start dying in bizarre and grotesque ways, it slowly becomes apparent that darker forces are at play. I had read from other reviews of this book that out of all the books in the series, it is the longest to get started. Since this is the first book I read in the series, I didn’t find that it took too long to get started, in fact, I found that the beginning is essential to introducing, fleshing out, and making you care about the characters. Though, I do agree that if this was a movie script rather than a novel, the first five chapters would have to be shortened and condensed. One of my favorite things about Final Destination is when the characters experience death’s foreshadowing moments, and I loved the moments leading up to the initial disaster in this book, even if some of them were cheesy and overly obvious. I loved the main premonition, but I do feel like it was the fastest and shortest main disaster in any Final Destination story I’ve ever experienced (so far). When I first started this book, I mistakenly thought Kate was going to be the protagonist that has the premonition (because of the woman on the cover art), and was surprised to see that it was Danny instead. After this realization, I was curious to see how the woman on the cover art related to the book’s storyline. 

This book reminded me of the first few Final Destination movies in the sense that it made me care about the main protagonist much like I cared for Alex, Kimberly and Wendy. This book does a good job at emphasizing that the people who don’t survive the initial disaster in these stories are people with their own lives and families, something that is a little bit glossed over by fans of this franchise. Since the Final Destination movies are a visual medium, the death scenes are often fast and explosive, but as this book is a written medium, the death scenes are much more detailed in their descriptions, both in execution and gore. Sometimes this meant that scenes that would have been fast in a movie seem slowed down or in slow motion here, but that’s just a byproduct of a written medium portraying things that occur within seconds. When the characters are researching previous premonitions in order to understand more about their situation, I expected to hear about the events of previous Final Destination movies, but the author instead chooses to mention other premonitions and deaths that don’t reference any actual Final Destination movies or books. I liked this decision, but I would have also loved to read a book or watch a movie that featured some of these one off headlines. I hope some other books in this series feature some of the premonitions and deaths referenced, but from what I’ve heard of them, I don’t think that they will. 

The mortician character in this book is a clear homage to William Bludworth, the mortician character from the movies, and I think it’s cool that people who work in the death care industries act as advisors to the characters and consultants about death since they literally work for death. I love that this book explored and expanded on the idea of the premonitions, implying that life itself and death itself are opposing supernatural forces, and the visions are life attempting to balance the scale. This book introduced interesting concepts, like that some people who die and come back can later become unknowing instruments of death that death can manipulate to cause different chain of events that cause others to die. I’m glad that this book focused on the aftermath of surviving a subway crash, because I always thought that storyline was good enough for its own movie, and was a little bit wasted as a twist ending in Final Destination 3. However, I would have loved if this book had somehow been centered around the Train 081 crash that killed Wendy and her surviving friends from Final Destination 3, with this book’s protagonists crossing paths with her before she perished in the crash. Regardless, I enjoyed the premise of this book and think it has enough strength to stand on its own and could easily be adapted into a movie. I highly recommend this book for fans of the Final Destination movies. I will definitely be reading the rest of the books in the series.

End of the Line

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