I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

I Was A Teenage Slasher is a horror novel set in Texas in 1989, as a seventeen-year-old finds himself part of a genre he never expected. Tolly Driver spends all his time with his best friend Amber, isn’t cool, and isn’t really notable other than having a recently deceased dad, but when Tolly and Amber go to an ill-fated party, suddenly Tolly finds himself the centre of a narrative he never expected. What happens when you’re the slasher and you never had an option not to be?

Having read several of Stephen Graham Jones’ previous books, I wanted to read this one without really paying attention to the blurb, so I didn’t have any particular expectations going in, but I love how Jones takes the concept—what if the protagonist (and narrator) becomes a slasher and the world bends supernaturally to facilitate all the tropes of the genre—and makes it both full of slasher gore and quite emotional. Tolly is telling the story by looking back from some kind of present day, giving the narration a sense of knowing what will happen without revealing too many details (though the twist near the end I felt was set up as I expected it). The narrative follows a particular pattern—it is a slasher, even as Tolly and Amber try to stop it being one—and it’s decently paced even with Jones’ distinctively detail-packed style (I definitely took a couple of his books to get used to his style, as you can get lost in all the offhand mentions of things).

There’s a fair bit of meta-commentary on slashers in horror fiction these days, with writers like Jones and Grady Hendrix exploring how the inconsistencies of slasher films could actually be utilised for interesting storytelling. In this book, the supernatural nature and inevitability of slasher tropes becomes the centre for a fun story of unexpected consequences. If you like meta-horror and know some of the expectations of the slasher genre, you’ll probably have a good time with this one.