Nobody rides for free and these kids are going to pay with their lives! No one cheats Death.
Final Destination: End of the Line is a novel by Rebecca Levene released in 2005 and the third Black Flame spin-off book.
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.
End of the Line contains tropes such as:
- Chainsaw Good: Mary-Beth gets sliced apart by one that's haphazardly swinging from scaffolding.
- Eye Scream: Jack Cohen slips and falls on the ground, getting a corkscrew in his eye. Instinctively, he pulls it out, along with part of his brain.
- Foreshadowing:
- Marybeth sees a plastic skeleton model dressed up on the hotel lobby.
- Louise finds an old copy of Murder on the Orient Express at the theme park, which Peter's mother was reading when she died.
- The rumble of the subway knocks a ketchup bottle off the table during breakfast, and spills it all over the white tiles.
- Final Girl: Louise King.
- Half-Identical Twins: Danny and Louise King.
- Human Pincushion: Bodil Raden and James Barker are impaled by umbrellas, of all things. The latter, however, had already passed out from blood loss after his arm was ripped off. Not that that's any less sadistic...
- I Am Very British: James is the sole British member of the group and the others think he speaks like he belongs on Masterpiece.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Peter Hoffman gets impaled on gazelle horns.
- Killed Off for Real: Surprisingly subverted for Louise. Played straight for everyone else, including Danny.
- Kate gets a Double Subversion.
- New Rules as the Plot Demands: Every other Final Destination work has made it clear that if you get skipped, you're moved to the end of Death's list. This work has Death stick on the character until they're killed.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Good job tampering with your brother's brakes on his motorcycle and sending him to his death, Louise.
- Resurrection Gambit: Louise attempts to do this, planning to overdose so that she can survive. And she does...but she comes back as Death's puppet, and she ends up killing her own brother by subconsciously tampering with his brakes so that he dies.
- The Reveal: Happens twice, back to back. The first reveal is that Kate Shelley inadvertently caused the deaths of all the survivors, and that she became a servant for Death after she was resuscitated during the Sux race. The second is that Louise also became a servant for Death after Kate brought her back to life after accidentally killing her. She ends up inadvertently killing her brother.
- Roof Hopping: All the kids in the hotel roof hop in order to escape Marybeth, who is waiting for them in the lobby. Bodil, who is extremely high, falls.
- Sixth Ranger Traitor: Kate, the only main character who isn't a member of the school trip, was actually "changed" by Death when she was Sux racing.
- Swiss-Cheese Security: A group of youngish teenagers have no problem breaking into a Coney Island theme park, and getting the rides working somehow.
