From New York Times bestselling horror writer Stephen Graham Jones comes a classic slasher story with a twist—perfect for fans of Riley Sager and Grady Hendrix.
Death, violence, gore.
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.
Don't just take our word for it...
“Readers will watch something original emerge before their eyes, realizing why everyone needs to be as obsessed with the Slasher as Jones is himself. Suggest to every reader who loves a perfectly rendered time and place or just wants a chilling, captivating, and thought provoking story where every detail matters and every page is worth their time.”
– Booklist, starred review
“The story has a clear love for the splashy slasher films that inspired it, and Jones does a great job of landing the plot’s gorier excesses as the bodies pile up…{F]ans of meta horror will find a lot to love as Jones remixes well-worn tropes with glee.”
– Publishers Weekly
Taste the very first page
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 brother 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.
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