New Arrival: I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Stephen Graham Jones may be entering his Stephen King phase. Not only is his name becoming synonymous with horror, thanks to novels like Mongrels and the Jade Daniels series, but he’s also demonstrating just how prolific he can be. He seems to be writing at a blistering pace where the novels just seem to fall out of his head as fully formed as Athena, but he’s also been branching out into other mediums, like comics. His current novel is a return to one of his tried-and-true favorite horror subgenre: the slasher. However, I Was a Teenage Slasher is far from a rehash of his previous work in the Jade Danies series; rather, it’s a tragic tale of a future slasher who’s agency was stolen from him. 

Lamesa, Texas circa 1989 is far from a bustling town. Their main exports are oil, cotton, and death. Death comes in the form of Tolly Driver, a rudderless seventeen-year-old who hangs out with his best friend Amber while trying to process the death of his father. One fateful night, Tolly becomes something worse than a disaffected teen; he becomes a slasher, an unstoppable killing machine that attacks the teens of Lamesa, taking full advantage of the Slasher rules that govern his abilities and drive him to murder everyone who wronged him. 

Made for fans of slashers but with more emotional heft than most slasher films, the story of Tolly discovering his abilities has more in common with superhero stories than slasher films. Much like superheroes (or villains, in Tolly’s case), his story involves struggling to accept what he’s become. Like the Jade Daniels series, this book is a loving homage to the slasher genre, but Jones flips the script by putting readers in the mind of the killer. That killer, it turns out, does not necessarily want to be a murder machine; rather, he is merely fulfilling the role this universe has given him. To put it another way, one could compare the moral of Tolly’s story to Uncle Ben’s advice to his nephew, the Amazing Spider-Man: With great power comes great responsibility (for Tolly, it should probably be “With great power comes a substantial body count”).