Stephen Graham Jones slashes expectations again.

        There was a moment, as I was reading I Was a Teenage Slasher, in which I started to understand what Stephen Graham Jones was doing as slasher-to-be Tolly Driver was being tested by his best friend (and big horror fan) Amber. In scenes that will appear familiar to fans of everything from Scream to Shazam, in which a hapless person is fan-splained the rules of the genre or given a battery of tests to gauge their abilities, Amber, convinced Tolly has become a “slasher” in the vein of Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Leatherface, puts him through a battery of tests, all of which seem to confirm what she believes. He can run surprisingly fast, even when there’s a rock in his shoe; he can sense when police are near; he can open doors that should be locked; he has impossibly good aim. These scenes are both darkly humorous and strikingly meta in a genre not often known for being original. These scenes, and many like them, including once the fabled Final Girl comes into the picture, are extremely creative and illustrate once again that Jones is one of today’s great horror writers.

            At a party, Tolly Driver is tied down with belts and fed peanuts, which he is extremely allergic to, by a group of teenagers. Most slashers have some kind of humiliating origin story – (remember poor young Jason Voorhees drowning as the camp counselors got busy?) and between the trauma of being humiliated and nearly dying, along with a series of extremely spoilery events that I’ll avoid going into here (and kiddies, I didn’t any of them coming), Tolly is “made” into a slasher who seeks revenge on those who wronged him and is wary of his Final Girl (for the uninitiated, think his arch-nemesis), who must be out there somewhere for, as the rules state, if there’s a Slasher in our midst, there must be a Final Girl, too.

            The bulk of the book is Tolly’s struggle with this new, dark part of himself. He has no desire to be a slasher, no desire for revenge at all, but finds out quickly that the compulsion, the power, call it what you will – within him, is stronger than his desire to just be an ordinary kid. With his friend Amber Big Plume Dennison, he starts to understand what it means to be a slasher and the abilities – both good and terrible  - that come with it.

            If the story sounds a little tongue-in-cheek, I suppose it is. As I mentioned before, some of these scenes where Amber is convincing him of his new, unwanted vocation feel more like something out of a superhero story, but that belies the fact that they are so darn clever, proving that Jones knows his slashers. Long-time fans of the genre (yours truly is guilty as charged) will be tickled pink – or perhaps crimson, like blood, once they realize what Amber is getting it, and you’ll instantly call to mind scenes from your favorite slasher pictures.

            Slasher stories are virtually never told from the perspective of the slasher themselves. One, that would give away their identity, which many stories try to keep a secret, at least for a while, and two, while they might have a few skeletons in their closet - which of us don’t -  most of us certainly don’t go around hacking up our tormentors. But I Was A Teenage Slasher is told in first-person narration by Tolly himself, which might at times conflict some readers, for he’s a likeable kid, he does not want to be a slasher at all, and yet, on the same page, dispatches other teens with sadistic aplomb. On that note, for fans of the genre, Jones does not disappoint. There are some deliciously wicked kill scenes in here. If you’ve ever seen SGJ in person or heard him interviewed, that is not a surprise.

            In the way he does with other familiar concepts in the horror genre, from werewolves to slashers and final girls and paranormal entities in his Indian Lake trilogy, Jones takes a concept that has been done a million times before and manages to spin something new out of it, injecting his humor, his culture, and his considerable talent in another fun read.