I Was A Teenage Slasher

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About The Book

*USA TODAY Bestseller * Alex Award Winner *

The “viciously clever, over-the-top, genre-skewing” (The New York Times Book Review) classic slasher story with a twist from Stephen Graham Jones, the master of modern horror and bestselling author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, The Only Good Indians, and the Indian Lake trilogy.

1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small 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 “playful, self-aware, and remarkably gory horror novel” (The New York Times).

About The Author

Gary Isaacs
Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and I Was a Teenage Slasher. He has been an NEA fellowship recipient and a recipient of several awards including the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the Alex Award from American Library Association. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Product Details

  • Publisher: S&S/Saga Press (July 16, 2024)
  • Length: 384 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781668022276

Raves and Reviews

"Stephen Graham Jones’s viciously clever, over-the-top, genre-skewing new novel turns a gruesome murderer into 'your friendly neighborhood slasher'...spectacularly engaging narrative voice, which is imbued with a street-smart lyricism that makes even the loftiest observations glitter like knife blades."

– —New York Times Book Review

"A playful, self-aware and remarkably gory horror novel."

– —The New York Times

“Readers will watch something original emerge before their eyes, realizing why everyone needs to be as obsessed with the Slasher as Jones is himself. Suggest to every reader who loves a perfectly rendered time and place or just wants a chilling, captivating, and thought provoking story where every detail matters and every page is worth their time.” 

– —Booklist, starred review

“The story has a clear love for the splashy slasher films that inspired it, and Jones does a great job of landing the plot’s gorier excesses as the bodies pile up…{F]ans of meta horror will find a lot to love as Jones remixes well-worn tropes with glee.”

– —Publishers Weekly

Awards and Honors

  • ALA Alex Award

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