I Was A Teenage Slasher

by Stephen Graham Jones

First published 2026

Tolly Driver is seventeen and stuck in Lamesa, Texas, where oil derricks dot the landscape and cotton fields stretch to the horizon. The year is 1989, and in this small west Texas town, everybody knows your business before you do. Tolly has always been the good kid with big dreams but little follow-through. Then something changes. A curse falls on him, twisting his world into something darker. Now he must kill for revenge, stalking through his own hometown like the slashers he's seen in summer movies. But this isn't a film. This is his life, his story, told in his own words as he writes his autobiography. Tolly becomes both hunter and hunted in the place he's always called home. The familiar streets and faces turn sinister as he grapples with what he's become. You'll find yourself pulling for a killer as his tragic story unfolds in blood and regret.

Genres: coming-of-age, horror, thriller

Vibes: dark, intimate, suspenseful

Tropes: hunter-and-hunted, unreliable-narrator

Setting: Lamesa, Texas

Period: 1989

384 pages · Paperback · S&S/Saga Press

Content warnings: gore, violence

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