49 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen Graham JonesI Was a Teenage Slasher
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Saturday”
The present-day Tolly apologizes to the parents of the teens he killed, then wonders if Amber ever had children of her own.
Returning to the narrative, Tolly and Amber escape the party and stop at a cotton field, where they wash up using the overhead sprinklers. As Tolly recovers from the shock of the massacre, Amber comments that Deek hasn’t fully escaped Justin’s wrath yet. Amber explains to Tolly that the recent events are fitting into the pattern of a slasher movie, drawing from her experience watching them with her older brother. If Justin is a slasher, then Stace is his final girl. The slasher theory also explains how Justin managed to escape after Stace tied him to the diving board.
They drive to a cotton gin to gas up Amber’s truck, but they must walk the rest of the way after the truck runs out of gas. They encounter Sheriff Burke, the first female sheriff in the county, on Tolly’s street. She came to Tolly’s house after hearing initial reports that Tolly was the only person who died at Deek’s party.
Since Justin and Stace are missing, they cannot support Tolly’s complete account of events. Tolly instead tells Sheriff Burke everything that happened at the party up until the point his anaphylactic shock had ended. Amber tries to support Tolly’s account, which Sheriff Burke doesn’t appreciate because of her prejudice toward Amber, who is Indigenous. Tolly is ashamed that he doesn’t stand up to the sheriff’s racism. The sheriff rules Tolly out as a suspect given his lean body weight, meaning that he wasn’t likely to have overpowered the heavier-built victims. She also rules out Amber, thinking her incapable of surviving the massacre. She challenges them to explain why Stace is missing, considering that she had called her father, a doctor, to assist with treating Tolly. Tolly pretends that he doesn’t remember Stace being there at all.
Sheriff Burke uses the phone in Tolly’s mom’s office to call the station for confidential information, and Amber and Tolly wait in the kitchen to eavesdrop. Amber asks to borrow a book from Tolly. When Amber complains about a price tag on the blouse she borrowed from Tolly’s mom, Tolly retrieves a knife to remove it. The knife makes a cinematic “Schting!” noise when Tolly picks it up. Amber tries to replicate the sound but fails.
Sheriff Burke gives Amber and Tolly a ride in her police cruiser. They stop at a pumpjack, where a deputy and a pumper are waiting for them. Deek has been killed, and his intestines are tied to the pumpjack’s hammerhead. Amber immediately suspects that Justin had caught up to him. Sheriff Burke shoots the pumpjack’s power box to deactivate it. Inside the pumpjack is Justin’s dead body. Unaware of Justin’s role in the massacre, the sheriff is left to assume that someone had dug him out of his grave and placed it there.
Tolly miraculously opens the police cruiser’s locked door to get a better look at the pumpjack. Soon after, they find Stace, still alive and resting on the back of the pumpjack. The unnamed deputy asks his fiancée to drive Tolly and Amber into town to retrieve diesel for Amber’s truck. They try to restart it, but when the first attempt fails, the deputy’s fiancée checks under the hood of the truck. Her cap flies off. Amber sends Tolly to retrieve it. The truck finally starts while Tolly is away, leading Amber to remark that Tolly is bad luck.
Amber explains how Deek, Stace, and Justin ended up at the pumpjack according to slasher genre conventions. They part ways at the hardware store run by Tolly’s mother. Tolly’s mother embraces him, grateful he is still alive. As he prepares to work in the warehouse, Tolly considers the possible direction his life could take if he used his natural writing talent to pursue college studies. He contrasts this skill against his abilities as a slasher, which include throwing weapons with perfect accuracy and heightened perception.
Tolly is working on a conveyor belt line when a box of spray paint cans falls out. One of the other workers tells Tolly that the sheriff has come looking for him. On his way to meet the sheriff behind the warehouse, he sees a loose spray paint can in the path of an oncoming supply truck. He retrieves the spray paint can and narrowly misses getting hit by the supply truck. Instead, he is run over by the truck owned by the deputy’s fiancée.
When Tolly regains consciousness, he is seemingly unaffected by his injuries. Tolly’s mother and the warehouse workers have restrained the deputy’s fiancée. Tolly learns that the deputy’s fiancée had come to return the novel Amber borrowed and left behind in the truck. Tolly’s mother is dumbfounded by his well-being.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Saturday Night”
Although most of Lamesa have gone into hiding, fearing a killer on the loose, Tolly and his mother carry out their usual nighttime routine of renting movies on video and watching them at home. Instead of renting his two favorite movies, American Anthem and American Ninja, which remind him too much of his father, Tolly rents Gymkata and An Officer and a Gentleman.
Tolly notices his perception of color changing, as if he suddenly has colorblindness. As he settles into the sensation of his changing vision, he feels the impulse to go outside. Thinking he has superpowers, he tries to leap over the fence and ends up stumbling and wounding himself. He goes to the bathroom to treat his wound. He experiences another seizure, though he only feels it around the external parts of his body, rather than in his internal organs. As his body transforms, he catches a glimpse of his mother’s belts.
Tolly makes his way to the Fireworks Camper, a location popular among Lamesa teens as a place to have sex. He finds two marching band members, Lesley Cantor and Shannon Larkweather, engaging in sexual activity there despite the rumors that Lesley is gay. Tolly experiences the events of that night like a passenger inside his own body, as if something else is controlling him and Tolly’s consciousness is viewing the events through the lens of a mask. He soon realizes that he is actually wearing a mask but is unsure where it came from.
Shannon emerges from the camper first. Tolly sneaks up behind her and repeatedly slams her head into the camper, killing her. When Lesley finds Shannon’s body, he escapes to the nearby grain elevator. Tolly pursues him, using one of his mother’s belts to catch him from a distance. He uses the belt to split Lesley’s skull against a utility pole, killing him.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
Where the first chapter introduced the conventions of the slasher, the next two chapters formalize these conventions as textual decisions through Amber. Amber’s expertise in slasher movies gives the novel a metanarrative quality. She comments on the tropes that emerge in a storytelling tradition while also cementing those tropes within the narrative itself to make them more recognizable whenever they occur.
This is crucial to Stephen Graham Jones’s intentions for the novel as Tolly starts to undergo the process of transformation into a slasher. Jones depicts the outcome of Justin’s blood intermingling with Tolly’s as a sequence of body horror. He gains powers that distort the human body’s ability to sustain damage and overcome its physical limitations. In this way, Tolly’s story also functions as a pastiche between the slasher film and the superhero origin story, highlighting the horrifying ways that superheroes discover their new abilities. Rather than use his newfound abilities for good, Tolly is overcome by his slasher persona for the first time, resulting in his very first kills in Chapter 3.
Justin Joss’s attack on the poolside party provides foreshadowing for Tolly’s own behavior: Tolly’s first victims are members of the marching band. Because Tolly indicated in the first chapter that his story begins with his peanut allergy, it’s implied that all the marching band members are at risk, nearly guaranteeing their deaths if the book remains faithful to its genre tropes. Likewise, as Amber suggests in Chapter 2, Tolly will have a showdown with the final girl after killing the last of the bandmembers. Given the events up to this point, there are two likely candidates for these roles: Mel is likely to be killed last because she initiated Tolly’s humiliation, while Amber is likely to be the final girl because of her affinity for the milieu at Deek’s party. Her knowledge of the genre conventions also gives her an advantage over Tolly by allowing her to anticipate and outwit him at his own game.
The fact that the reality of the novel is so neatly fitting into genre conventions is Jones’s way of commenting on the theme of Fate Versus Free Will. Rather than give the characters the agency to overcome the rules and roles they are to play in the slasher, Jones depicts them as powerlessly tied down to conventions. Apart from Tolly’s inability to control his movements when his slasher persona emerges, Jones hints at the idea of destiny by making one of Tolly’s first victims, Lesley, act against his own sexual identity. Despite the rumors that Lesley is gay, he has sex with Shannon because of what the genre demands of them. Tolly must find them recklessly enjoying activities that go against conservative morality. That way, their punishment can be justified as a warning against those who act in similarly reckless ways.
At the same time, the marching band’s lack of remorse or restitution exacerbates Tolly’s alienation as an outsider in his peer environment. This consequently makes it easier for him to commit to his identity as a slasher. Because his peers reject him so fully, it wouldn’t make much difference for him to become a killer. If anything, enacting violence against them is Tolly’s way of reclaiming agency against the social hierarchies that trap and ostracize him, even if this means fulfilling a role he regrets entering.
Tolly’s defiance against the nature of social hierarchy finds an echo in his violent transformation into a slasher. When Tolly is hit by the deputy’s fiancée, it recalls the death of his father, who passed away in a horrific car accident. Tolly’s survival could thus be interpreted as a refusal to accept that such a tragedy could happen in his reality. If losing his father that way is possible, then so should his gradual transformation into a slasher. Tolly walks away from his near-death experiences physically unscathed, as if to call attention to the unnatural internal violence of his humiliation. In this way the story wrestles between the themes of Grief and the Struggle for Social Acceptance and The Perils of Revenge.
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