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.”
Jones is no horror novice: He’s been publishing steadily for over two decades. Yet it was the success of his 2020 novel “The Only Good Indians,” which blends the struggles of contemporary Native American life with a supernatural elk story, that brought him a deservedly wider audience. “I Was a Teenage Slasher” is less concerned with vanishing cultural memory — unless that shared memory is of being a lonely American teenager with a love of 1980s slasher films.
Much of the story is understandably preposterous, and Jones is clearly having a fun time playing with horror-genre tropes. A few scenes lean too heavily on comic book conventions, and the problem with parody is that it often suffers the same tedium of the formulaic devices it sets out to critique. What saves the novel, what makes us not only follow Tolly but care about him as he bashes one teenager’s head into a camper and impales another with a twirling baton, is his spectacularly engaging narrative voice, which is imbued with a street-smart lyricism that makes even the loftiest observations glitter like knife blades. “You’d think that, dragging bodies behind you, at some point you wouldn’t be able to keep moving, wouldn’t you?” our protagonist muses. “Not so. They’re all there, they never go away, but they’re tin cans, they don’t weigh anything. Just make a lot of noise.”
The story is narrated by a middle-aged Tolly looking back from the present day, a vantage point that casts Lamesa and its cursed citizens in the golden glow of nostalgia. That might be the creepiest part of revisiting the ’80s slasher horror genre as a whole: how innocent and uncomplicated the world it depicts tends to seem, even with a psycho killer on the loose. Maybe it’s because the line between good and evil, predator and prey, is so pronounced. Or, as Tolly quips, “The world’s so much simpler when you’ve got a chain saw in your hand.”