I was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

 I was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones, 373 pages, ⭐⭐⭐

Lamesa, Texas, July 1989

It’s the summer before senior year for best friends Tolly Driver and Amber Dennison. They’re not in the marching band, they’re not in the FFA – they don’t really count. Amber’s the only Native student in town, and Tolly’s only on the radar due to his father’s recent death.

This is all about to change.

Bodies are going to be dropping fast in this small West Texas town. For a few unbearably hot days that will resonate through the decades and even get made into a TV movie, Tolly and Amber will be famous. Notorious even. Finally, everyone will know their names.

This is Stephen Graham Jones x-raying the slasher genre, interrogating its motivations over the shoulder and in the voice of the killer itself – from a town he did some growing up in, in a year he was also seventeen.

The kills will be poignant, the jokes will hurt, and the violence will be endearing. Everything’s turned around for Tolly, for Amber – for all of Lamesa, Texas.

2.5 rounded up

I am soooooo torn on this review because on one hand I thought that the plot was very fun and unique but on the other hand the writing style was just abysmal. I felt like I took double the time it would normally take to finish a book of this length solely because I was getting lost in the writing (in a bad way). There is so much rambling. I know Stephen King is the go to when someone talks about rambling authors but he has nothing on this SGJ book. I've read The Only Good Indians and I didn't find this problem so I'm not sure if it was a creative decision for this specific narrator?