Simon & Schuster have been delivering a lot of great summer reads my way and Stephen Graham Jones’ latest tale, I Was a Teenage Slasher is wonderful fun.

Tolly and Amber are best of friends in high school. It’s the 80s, with the best music, best movies, and best clothes, and they are content to live on the fringes of their high school existence, hanging out, goofing off, and ignoring the oncoming rush of their future.

It all goes to hell when a horrific event births a new slasher in Tolly! Happily, Amber knows the rules of the genre, knows what has to happen, knows beat by beat how things have to play out. And if you know anything about the genre, then you do too, right down to the confrontation with the Final Girl.

Jones takes the slasher genre, something he loves and has played in before with The Indian Lake Trilogy (I still need to read the second and third book), and sets it in the real world of Lamesa, Texas. Jones was a teenager at the time the novel is set, he grew up in the area, so he is marrying his own nostalgia with horror, and it works wonderfully.

He puts us in Tolly’s head, delivering a first-person narrative that reads like as if Tolly were actually talking to the reader, as he explores his new found abilities even as he dreads the horror he is being forced to wreak.

From fun little things like the noise a knife makes when a slasher picks it up, to a slasher’s ability to simply disappear when no one is looking, to recovering from a seemingly impossible wound all of the tropes of the genre are here. All of them. They are toyed with, twisted, and then play out exactly as they should, because there are rules.

Rules that not only affect Tolly, but affect his victims, the authorities, and the town. And Jones plays this up, wonderfully. I guffawed a number of times, even while I was wincing over some of the kills.

Bloody, horrifying, and frequently funny no trope is spared as Tolly ups his body count on those who wronged him and, consequently, it makes for a really fun ride. There are a few surprises, and I loved the ending. Jones tells a great story, makes it almost a conversation, and wraps you up in Tolly’s mind and his troubles.

It also lets you see the slasher in a slightly different way, which may necessitate revisiting some of those 80s classics and watching them with fresh eyes.

I Was a Teenage Slasher is a very enjoyable read for horror fans, and I love how it plays within the genre, honoring it, while also pointing out how crazy it can be.

I was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones is available now from Simon & Schuster, read it!