So, on one of my recent bookstore trips, I ran across Stephen Graham Jones's I Was A Teenage Slasher and wound up checking it out of the library. Which made me really happy I didn't pay to own a copy, since frankly, it was was about exciting as watching paint dry.
The story is narrated by one Tolly Driver, who is narrating his tale of his 17th summer in Lamesa, Texas. We find that Tolly's dad had died within a year of the start of this tale, his mother owned a hardware store, and he was essentially just short of being a juvenile delinquent. He and his best friend Amber decide to crash a popular teen's party one night, and Tolly gets really drunk and throw up on a band member. The band members at the party tie Tolly to a chair and force a Coke down his throat. Problem being, the Coke has peanuts in it. which Tolly is allergic to, which sends Tolly into anaphylaxis.
Tolly's fomer babysitter and current crush, Stace, finds Amber and gets the Epipen, which gets Tolly breathing again, just in time to witness a zombie crash the pool party. Seems said zombie was a former peer of the students at the party, who had been egged into trying to bronco ride an oil jack, which wound up decapitating him. Now, with a bit of some kind for a hand, said zombie is back for revenge.
Mind you, this gets introduced on page 90 or so, and has next to no effect on the plot beyond zombie getting blood on Tolly's forehead and being found the next day ripped apart by another grasshopper, with the bodies of his main tormentor and his final girl also trapped in the rigging.
In this setting, it seems that Slashers are born out of some kind of infection that makes them seek revenge.
So, Tolly finds at night he goes color blind, can move really fast as long as no one is watching, and his Mom's belts can be a mask, along with some other things common to movie slashers.
This leads to a few hundred pages of avoiding the cops, killing six people who tied him to a chair, and did I mention lots and lots of whining?
Because seriously. With his just above poverty life and the whining, the entire narrative is like reading Holden Caufield of Catcher in the Rye narrating traveling to California with the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, only with a left field zombie attack that shoehorns Friday the 13th: Jason Goes to Hell into the narrative. I mean, it's not only bad, but boring. I realize it's up for Best Horror Novel of 2024 on Goodreads, but I fail to see why, unless the other finalists were even worse somehow. Either that or everyone else got something from it I didn't. I mean, I could say the flaws come from lacking the visual and audio cues that make a slasher movie work, but adjacent thematic books I could name take similar tacks and still work better than this mess. (Zombie Ohio by Scott Kenemore in particular. It's narrated by a zombie who manages to retain some of his brain function.)
While some people obviously enjoyed this, I can't list myself among them.
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