3.5
I Was A Teenage Slasher
ByPublisher Description
*USA TODAY Bestseller * Alex Award Winner *
The “viciously clever, over-the-top, genre-skewing” (The New York Times Book Review) classic slasher story with a twist from Stephen Graham Jones, the master of modern horror and bestselling author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, The Only Good Indians, and the Indian Lake trilogy.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, and shared sense of unfairness of being on the outside through the slasher horror Jones loves, but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this “playful, self-aware, and remarkably gory horror novel” (The New York Times).
The “viciously clever, over-the-top, genre-skewing” (The New York Times Book Review) classic slasher story with a twist from Stephen Graham Jones, the master of modern horror and bestselling author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, The Only Good Indians, and the Indian Lake trilogy.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, and shared sense of unfairness of being on the outside through the slasher horror Jones loves, but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this “playful, self-aware, and remarkably gory horror novel” (The New York Times).
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesI Was A Teenage Slasher Reviews
3.5
“I love SGJ’s foray into the slasher sub-genre of horror… and hopefully it’s not a one time occurrence.”
“The Good: Talk about a sympathetic villain. Tolly Driver had it hard before he became a spectator in his own body as it went on a trope-y, vengeance-driven killing spree. Experiencing the juxtaposition of his goofy, caring teen boy and his dead-eyed, rampaging slasher made for a super interesting, if melancholy, read. 🔪
The “But I Wanted to Laugh”: This being an 80s slasher story, I’d hoped for a few more zany, over-the-top moments that made me laugh (or at least say what-the-fuck), but humanizing the antagonist into the protagonist made this story less fun than I’m used to from the genre. 🥺
The Bottom Line: Stephen Graham Jones can write, and this love letter to the Texas of his youth shined through all the gore and the slasher dogma in ways that made me nostalgic for a place I’ve never been. Read it! 🛢️”“5 stars !!!
This one does have a little bit of a slower start. It does jump into the action. The writing sounds a little bit different than I’m used to with his writing so once I picked up what he had changed with his writing and got emerged in the story I was fully in! At first, I was like oh this one’s different. I don’t know if I’m going to like it as well if I liked his other ones.
I was so wrong! I ended up loving this one as much as I’ve loved his other works. This is the true example of serial killer kind of meets Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde. You can truly tell his love and passion for slasher films and the slasher genre that one has to really know the rules to be able to break them. And once again he shows that he writes the best female characters!
Every time I read one of his books I just imagine myself at a bonfire and someone is telling me the story and they’re giving me their perspective of what happened but also where they’re at now and it’s just this beautiful storytelling that takes me back to my childhood”
Change and growDiverse representationFormulaicLikeableMemorableMinor characters stand outMorally ambiguousMultilayeredRelatableStrong relationshipsStrong villainAddictiveClever plottingGripping/excitingSlow start, strong finishSuspensefulTwistyUnpredictableAtmosphericBeautifulDarkEerieRusticSetting fits the storyBeautifully-writtenOriginalWittyChild lossDeathGriefMurderViolence
About Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and I Was a Teenage Slasher. He has been an NEA fellowship recipient and a recipient of several awards including the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the Alex Award from American Library Association. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Other books by Stephen Graham Jones
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