Friday
It was the best of times––high school––and it was the suckiest of times: high school.
Would I trade it, though?
If I could unkill six people, not make the whole town of Lamesa, Texas gnash their teeth and tear their clothes and have to go to funeral after funeral that searing-hot July?
Okay, I’m maybe exaggerating a bit about the clothes tearing. Though I’m sure some grieving sibling or friend or conscripted cousin split a seam of their borrowed sports jacket, heaving a coffin up into a hearse. And I bet a dentist or two paid their golf fees with money earned spackling the yellowy molars a whole town of restless sleepers had been grinding in their sleep, not sure if it was over. Not sure if I was gone.
And, yeah––“golf fees?”
I don’t know.
People who wear plaid pants and hit small balls aren’t exactly the crowd I run with.
The crowd I do run with are . . . well. We’re the ones with black hearts and red hands. Masks and machetes.
And until I was seventeen, I never even knew about us.
My name is Tolly Driver. Which isn’t just this grimy keyboard messing my typing up. Tolly isn’t short for “Tolliver,” and Driver was just my dad’s random last name, and probably his dad before him, and I don’t know where it comes from, and even if I did, even if I had my whole family history back to some fancy-mustached dude reining mules this was and that, it wouldn’t change anything.
In 1989, a thing happened in Lamesa, Texas. No, a thing happened to Lamesa, Texas.
And to me.
And to six people of the graduating class, some of whom I’d known since kindergarten.
It also happened to my best friend, Amber.
She’s why I’m writing this all down at last.
I don’t know where you are anymore, Ambs.
Maybe we weren’t meant to ever see each other again, after we were seventeen?
In real life, I mean. Because I still see you every night, the way you were the summer between our junior and senior years. What was Cinderella’s big song on the radio, then? “Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone?” I should have taken Kix’s advice, though, and not closed my eyes. Not even once.
I know now that we never should have gone to that party at Deek Masterson’s, Amber. What I wouldn’t give to let us just make one more round up and down the drag instead. To have sat on your tailgate at the carwash and watched classmates roll in, pile into different front seats and truck beds, and then leave again. We could have eventually eased out to our big oil tank on the east side of town, done the two-straw thing with our thousandth syrupy Dr. Pepper from the Town & Country, and watched the meteors scratch light into the sky then fizzle into lonelier and lonelier sparks, each of us holding our breath, not having to say anything.
When I look back, that’s how I see us best: in the last moments before we turned right on Bryan Street, to slope out to Deek’s on the north side of town, the Richie Rich houses. I’m riding shotgun in your little Rabbit truck, with the bucket seat that slid forward on its rails every time you braked, conking my head on the windshield.
Few people love slashers as much as NYT-bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones. Not only was his 2020 novel The Only Good Indians a slasher at its core, but slashers permeate every element of the Jade Daniels/Indian Lake trilogy that began with My Heart is a Chainsaw (our review). While that trilogy is poised to take a bow in March 2024, fret not, Stephen Graham Jones will next take on the summer slasher with I Was a Teenage Slasher.
Just in time for Halloween, Bloody Disgusting can exclusively reveal the cover and an excerpt for the upcoming ’80s set slasher novel, set to arrive on July 16, 2024.
Here’s the official plot synopsis from Simon & Schuster: “1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas 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, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.”
The jacket design below by Jon Bush captures the killer and ’80s vibe. As if that’s not enough, read on for an exclusive excerpt that teases the teen with a murderous streak!
The following is a Bloody Disgusting Exclusive excerpt from I WAS A TEENAGE SLASHER by Stephen Graham Jones. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of Saga Press of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Friday
It was the best of times––high school––and it was the suckiest of times: high school.
Would I trade it, though?
If I could unkill six people, not make the whole town of Lamesa, Texas gnash their teeth and tear their clothes and have to go to funeral after funeral that searing-hot July?
Okay, I’m maybe exaggerating a bit about the clothes tearing. Though I’m sure some grieving sibling or friend or conscripted cousin split a seam of their borrowed sports jacket, heaving a coffin up into a hearse. And I bet a dentist or two paid their golf fees with money earned spackling the yellowy molars a whole town of restless sleepers had been grinding in their sleep, not sure if it was over. Not sure if I was gone.
And, yeah––“golf fees?”
I don’t know.
People who wear plaid pants and hit small balls aren’t exactly the crowd I run with.
The crowd I do run with are . . . well. We’re the ones with black hearts and red hands. Masks and machetes.
And until I was seventeen, I never even knew about us.
My name is Tolly Driver. Which isn’t just this grimy keyboard messing my typing up. Tolly isn’t short for “Tolliver,” and Driver was just my dad’s random last name, and probably his dad before him, and I don’t know where it comes from, and even if I did, even if I had my whole family history back to some fancy-mustached dude reining mules this was and that, it wouldn’t change anything.
In 1989, a thing happened in Lamesa, Texas. No, a thing happened to Lamesa, Texas.
And to me.
And to six people of the graduating class, some of whom I’d known since kindergarten.
It also happened to my best friend, Amber.
She’s why I’m writing this all down at last.
I don’t know where you are anymore, Ambs.
Maybe we weren’t meant to ever see each other again, after we were seventeen?
In real life, I mean. Because I still see you every night, the way you were the summer between our junior and senior years. What was Cinderella’s big song on the radio, then? “Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone?” I should have taken Kix’s advice, though, and not closed my eyes. Not even once.
I know now that we never should have gone to that party at Deek Masterson’s, Amber. What I wouldn’t give to let us just make one more round up and down the drag instead. To have sat on your tailgate at the carwash and watched classmates roll in, pile into different front seats and truck beds, and then leave again. We could have eventually eased out to our big oil tank on the east side of town, done the two-straw thing with our thousandth syrupy Dr. Pepper from the Town & Country, and watched the meteors scratch light into the sky then fizzle into lonelier and lonelier sparks, each of us holding our breath, not having to say anything.
When I look back, that’s how I see us best: in the last moments before we turned right on Bryan Street, to slope out to Deek’s on the north side of town, the Richie Rich houses. I’m riding shotgun in your little Rabbit truck, with the bucket seat that slid forward on its rails every time you braked, conking my head on the windshield.
You stopped short a lot that summer.
And me, I laughed until thin blood sheeted down my face. Until it outlined my mouth. Until it was dripping off my chin like I’d been bathing in it.
Don’t look at me like that, please.
That’s not who I really was. That’s just what I ended up doing.
I was a teenage slasher, yeah, okay. I said it.
And it wasn’t because my career placement test told me what I was, and it wasn’t because I’d been harboring secret resentments since sixth grade, about some traumatic prank.
It was because I had, and still live with, a peanut allergy.
How’s that for motivation?
“Tolly Driver’s rage built over the years, seeing his classmates eat trail mix with apparent impunity, until it finally simmered over, resulting in a swath of destruction four days long and six bodies deep.”
That’s the 60 Minutes version of me. If the world had cared enough about Lamesa, Texas to even notice.
Or maybe I’m more 20/20 material? “An unassuming high school junior, slight of build, academically unexceptional, recently deprived of his father, woke one morning to see the world through different eyes, worse eyes, more dangerous eyes, and the people around him paid the price.” ...
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