Thompson’s novel operates as a piece of metafiction, a narrative that intentionally draws attention to its own construction by overtly acknowledging the genre conventions it incorporates. Notable literary examples of metafiction include Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which includes a 999-word poem by a fictional author and accompanying commentary by a fictional editor whose notations create a new narrative. Stephen Graham Jones’s metafictional novel My Heart is a Chainsaw follows a teenage protagonist obsessed with horror films, who invokes her knowledge of the genre to hunt a serial killer in her town. Like Graham’s final girl, Jade Daniels, Thompson’s protagonist uses her extensive research on both rom-coms and slasher movies to escape a murderer determined to win her heart.

Thompson builds her story on the deliberate fusion of two totally different genres: the slasher film and the romantic comedy. Jamie’s PhD dissertation analyzes this very intersection, allowing her to process her traumatic reality through the analytical framework of genre rules she studies—a device that allows Thompson to consistently blur the lines between fiction and reality. As Jamie tells Wes after the first murder, “If I just pretend it’s a scene from a movie and not actually happening in real life, I can make my legs move” (58). Thompson explicitly references the slasher formula and positions Jamie as the archetypical “final girl,” a term coined by scholar Carol J. Clover to describe a “self-reliant usually female protagonist of a Slasher film who, against all odds, manages to subdue the killer and survive through her own means. […] [W]hat sets her apart from the other female victims is her responsibility and intelligence, her competence and practicality” (Sotelo, Andrea G. “The Final Girl and Male Vs. Female Representation in Horror Films.” Gender, Death, and FNC 2021. Vol. 26, Issue 7-8, August 2022). As the plot progresses, Jamie’s awareness of slasher rules consistently informs her own survival strategy.

Simultaneously, Thompson’s plot follows the narrative beats of a romantic comedy, epitomized by novels such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and its many modern adaptations, including Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding and Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev. Jamie and Wes experience a “real-life meet-cute”—a classic romantic comedy trope in which the two leads first meet in an unexpected, humorous, or charming way—and overcome internal and external obstacles before finding love. Throughout the novel, Jamie argues that both the slasher and rom-com genres follow an “analogous format, one that contains certain rules” (2), where protagonists win by adhering to the formula. By applying these rules, she makes sense of both the violence around her and her own growing romantic feelings for Wes:

The second John walked down the hallway I knew what would happen next. Just like when Wes and Billie went downstairs. The splitting of the group is part of how the plot progresses. It's like in a rom-com where the romantic leads are forced into close proximity or get caught in the rain or share one bed. You need something to move the story forward. (123)

By interweaving these tropes, the novel creates a meta-commentary on how audiences interpret formulaic storytelling, blurring the lines between the archetypal quest for survival and the equally structured quest for love.