Simone and Her Books

If you’re a fan of slasher films like Friday the 13th or Halloween and you’ve always wanted to know what motivates the killer to do what he does? Well, this insightful story dives into the mind of a slasher and plays around with the idea that maybe they’re as much the victim as the ones they murder.

Here’s more about I Was a Teenage Slasher

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas 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 summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.

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My Thoughts

Again, please don’t let me tell you I’m a good person in any way. I don’t claim not to have done what I most definitely and really did. My hands are forever red, and my heart will always be black.

I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started reading this book. Honestly, it started off as a confession to some heinous murders this young boy Tolly Driver committed when he was a kid. However, it wasn’t just a confession, it was so much more and exactly the kind of story I love reading. And in some ways, you do end up rooting for the killer in this one.

The story follows Tolly as he goes into the events that led him to killing six of his fellow classmates in the summer of 1989. And at an ill-fated party with a bunch of his classmates, he’s bullied by members of the marching band to eat peanuts, a food he’s allergic to. When the zombie of a fellow classmate arrives at the party to enact his revenge on the kids that caused his death, Tolly knew that he was cursed to do the same to his own bullies.

I am honestly surprised by this book. It’s playful in using slasher films tropes as a curse Tolly is forced to enact. You see him and his best friend Amber trying to figure out what his mask is, what triggers his transformation. They see the transformation in the kids that he kills as well turning into the type of victims you see in slasher films (horny teenagers who put their guard down). They even discuss the final girl; the trope of all tropes in slasher films where there’s only one victim left and it’s usually a young girl who inexplicably escapes the clutches of the slasher. It’s fun to see how a slasher is born, what makes them tick, what motivates them, but this book offers something more.

This book is extremely literary. I knew that we were going to get a confession-style story from Tolly, but it dives even further than that. Tolly is still mourning the loss of his father, how to handle his grieving mother. He’s still figuring out how to be a normal teenager, how to navigate his future, how to handle his past. A lot of what you read is about his potential to be something bigger than he is and the total regret that he will never live up to it. He mentions Lamesa being the only place he’ll ever know and writing his story from the knowledge that he’ll never return. He even hopes for his best friend, Amber, to have the future that he can’t have for himself. This was the most intriguing part of the story and perhaps even the part we don’t see when it comes to slashers; the potential if they didn’t do the horrific things they did.

Of course, you’re going to still get a good dose of horror in this book. After all, this is a slasher book and so the rules of the slasher must be followed, which both Tolly and his best friend Amber figure out by the end of the book. But if there’s a genre for literary horror stories, I think Stephen Graham Jones would be in there.