I was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

Book Review

Pauline Morgan

When most people think of the kind of horror novel or film (slasher horror) the tend to think of a group of innocents, often teenagers, stumbling into a situation and the group gradually being massacred in the bloodiest of ways by an unknown assailant until only one is left, who may or may not escape. This is a formula, followed by many, with varying degrees of success. Always, the point of view is with the victims. It is their fear that keeps the viewer/reader on the edge of their seat. Then you toss an intelligent writer like Stephen Graham Jones into the mix and they turn the genre on its head.

            From the first page of I Was a Teenage Slasher, the identity of the Slasher is known. This is his story. He explains who he is, how he became a slasher and why he is writing this account. Tolly Driver is not a monster by choice but a victim of circumstances beyond anyone’s control. There are familiar tropes, such as a group of teenagers with too many rampant hormones who think bullying the weakest member of their group is funny. And there is a supernatural element to trigger the sequence of events.

            The setting is the oil fields of Texas in 1989, in the small town of Lamesa. Though they are unaware of it at the time, it starts with the teens daring hanger-on Justin Joss to climb onto the beam of an oil rig to ride it like a bronco. Desperate to be accepted, he did and lost his life as a result. If this weren’t a slasher story, everyone involved would have learnt a lesson and that would have been the end of it.

            For Tolly, the problems started when he was persuaded by his friend Amber to gate-crash Deek Masterson’s party. A mistake in many ways because Deek was the ringleader of the group who had caused Justin’s death. Several things went wrong before and during the party. Amber’s truck was old and irascible, and as it bounced along, Tolly hit his head on the windscreen, causing a cut. Already out of sorts, he drank too much and threw up. This made him less popular than he already was, so members of the school marching band tied him to a poolside chair and fed him peanuts even though he is allergic to them. It is only Amber’s quick reaction to fetch an EpiPen from her truck that saves his life. But the worst part of that is still to come. The rotting corpse of Justin Joss appears and starts killing those who inadvertently caused his death. It could have ended with that massacre, but some of the fluid dripping from Joss splattered Tolly’s face and into the cut on his brow. Tolly becomes a slasher.

            Justin’s after-death rampage is revenge against the heartlessness of those who were instrumental in his death. Just being there was enough to make them a target. Tolly took on that legacy but against his tormentors. Initially, he was unaware of what was happening. He experienced dreams in which he was a slasher, killing those who had participated in his near-death experience. He thought his mind was playing out in dreams the revenge he desired, though in his waking life he was not the kind of person who would seek to carry out cold-blooded murder. It was the disappearance of his first victims that started him wondering.

            The novel is Tolly’s first-person account of the events that lead him to the realisation that he is a teenage slasher. He narrates everything, leaving nothing out. It is almost a love-letter to Amber, and an explanation as to why he disappeared from her life.

            This provides a fresh look at the slasher subgenre of horror fiction. Normally, the sympathy is with the victims and against the abomination that is hunting them down, but in this case, Tolly comes across as the sympathetic character. It isn’t his fault what happens to him. Most of his victims have a nasty, sadistic streak or did nothing to prevent their cruelty.

An excellent read for aficionados of this kind of fiction.