Review by zombiezami - I Was a Teenage Slasher

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zombiezami 's review for:

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

4.5

challenging dark emotional funny informative mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

This was a little difficult to get into at first. I needed to restart this a couple of times because I kept missing what exactly was compelling Tali to kill others. I kept getting mesmerized by the author’s highly descriptive and meandering prose such that I wasn’t quite taking it all in. But once it clicked, I started really enjoying it. Maybe enjoying is the wrong word, but you get what I mean.

The inciting incident creates this interesting kind of fractal: allergic reactions are an immune system’s overreaction to stimuli that would otherwise be innocuous. When we find out that Amber, not Mel, is the final girl because, in the logic of the slasher possession or whatever’s happening, anyone who harmed Tali just before he got infected, however minutely, becomes a target. This, even though Amber only caused him to get a slight cut. The targeting of Amber, too, is a bodily overreaction. I thought that was cool.

Content Warnings