I was a Teenage Slasher - Stephen Graham Jones

 


Alex Award

Man, this book was thrilling. I have been a huge fan of Stephen Graham Jones since I first read his novel The Only Good Indians, which was so good that I actually dropped the book out of shock with how gruesome one of the scenes was (granted, it is a horror novel). And so when I saw this book was an option for the Alex Award, I slammed this option down. And it did not disappoint! This book was a perfect mixture of horrific, funny, metatextual, and melancholy to be a perfect mix for me. The book is all about the protagonist becoming a teenage slasher, and it makes fun, but also plays homage to the slasher subgenre of horror movies. But, it shows his transformation in subtle ways and explains common tropes of the genre through the eyes of the slasher instead of their victims. But this story is also about the relationships that are built during this time and how much they can impact people. Because the protagonist is a loser (their words, not mine) and doesn’t have a lot of friends, we get to see how much they value the friendship that they do have. I wasn’t expecting a story that made me feel genuine sorrow for a character that also brutally murders several of his classmates in comically gruesome ways (the scene where he uses a rusted pipe as a javelin to spear someone to a windmill is gonna stick with me). 

I know that I’m biased because I’m a horror movie nut, but this is exactly the kind of book that I would recommend to some of my reluctant readers. I’ve noticed that a lot of my students have recently been very interested in horror movies and they are surprisingly going back and watching a lot of the older classics. I think that the meta commentary of the book is a fun detail that even casual viewers of horror movies would be able to pick up on. One big part of this book that worried me going into it, was how appropriate I would be for teens considering how gruesome the last Stephen Graham Jones novels tend to be (When telling my fiance about the book, she even questioned the same thing after I told her who the author was). But, I honestly think that this one was more tame than his previous books, because I think the author was more intent on telling a story about his adolescence, than he was trying to write a horrific slasher novel. This is one that I would highly recommend to my students that love horror, but are likely to not pick up a book. 

★★★★★

Awesome book. I’ve been thinking about it for days. 


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