Don’t Worry, It’s Only Your ‘Friendly Neighborhood Slasher’

I WAS A TEENAGE SLASHER, by Stephen Graham Jones

Literature has been a thriving hunting ground for the serial killer. If the 20th century brought about the emergence of the maniac repeat murderer as “a new kind of person … one of the superstars of our wound culture,” as the critic Mark Seltzer posits in his 1998 cultural study “Serial Killers,” then ambitious fiction writers were sure to examine this new human species under their microscope.

The apogee of serial-killer fiction arguably arrived in the 1990s, with the psychopath as first-person narrator in the radical nihilism of Dennis Cooper’s “Frisk,” Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Zombie.” But even the serial killer isn’t immune to trends. In keeping with our current century’s predilection for turning monsters and boogeymen into misunderstood outcasts, Stephen Graham Jones’s viciously clever, over-the-top, genre-skewing new novel turns a gruesome murderer into “your friendly neighborhood slasher.”

The plot of “I Was a Teenage Slasher” is straight out of the horror section of the video store. It’s the summer of 1989, in small-town Lamesa, Texas. Our protagonist is Tolly Driver, an awkward 17-year-old. He and his best friend, Amber, decide to crash a party thrown by the cool kids — the same cool kids who, a few years back, caused the death of another student by forcing him to ride a pump jack, resulting in his accidental dismemberment. When this dead student reappears as a zombie at the party to enact gory revenge, some of his monster blood splatters into a cut on Tolly’s forehead.

The rest makes sense only if you’re willing to go along for the joyride. Infected, our narrator morphs into an unstoppable, superhuman killing machine, seeking out members of the school marching band who played a near-fatal trick on him. Tolly has no control over his new bloodlust, stalking and killing by night in a mask fashioned from his mother’s belts. As he proclaims, “I was the scary thing in the dark.”