I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

 

This was a remarkably fun novel to read, more fun than I would have guess if I'd known it was such a paean to slasher movies and hair metal--two things I don't care all that much for. I mean, I love some aggro in my rock music (when I listen to it) but hair metal is bland; and I adore Horror as a genre but slasher fiction isn't about worming under your skin and eating your mind from the inside so much as it is about cheap gore and crappy jump scares. That said, there's a lot of love here for those two misbegotten genres, and the novel works well even from a nonfan's POV, I think. There's a really unexpected amount of humanity in the slasher, here, and his ability to make one final choice for himself makes the ending hit pretty hard. What's funny is that it's clear Grady Hendrix loves slasher movies and metal--he wrote a book about each trying to prove it--and Jones, here, manages a novel with more humor and wit than anything Hendrix has done, an actual pleasure to read, that doesn't make you feel the author's making fun of anyone, there's no archness here, though there's plenty of self-awareness.