The Nostalgia of Texas Gothic and Horror

Last Monday, I had the pleasure of moderating the Q&A and book signing of I Was A Teenage Slasher with one of my favorite authors, Stephen Graham Jones. It's been years since I've attended such a book event in a Barnes & Noble and it felt pretty damn good. Considering it was a week-work afternoon during rush hour, we had a great SRO crowd.

Slasher is a very American story, tapping on cultural touchstones that may not resonate with someone who was not raised in this country. Though Jones and I grew up hundreds of miles and a decade apart, we were each familiar with the identical childhood and adolescent rituals that provided a backdrop to this tale. The Saturday morning marathon watching cartoons. Hanging out at the local convenience store. High school culture with the cool kids and everyone else. The Band. Majorettes. The markers of Texas Gothic--water towers forlorn as abandoned cathedrals, long stretches of desolate highway through the dusty prairie. Barbed-wire fences and cattle guards. Rust. Dirt. Youthful angst and a yearning for the bigger world on the other side of the horizon. A promise to get away and never look back. Then drawn back to immerse yourself in the selected memories of your past.

But Slashers is hardly an ode to nostalgia with its graphic depictions of torture and humiliating slayings. Jones used a couple of tropes to power the momentum and stoke the horror. First is that of an unreliable narrator to string you along from one ghastly murder to another, making you distrust your ability to understand the narrative. Second, his protagonist (and villain) and the side-kick accomplice note how the slayings conformed to the plot of a teenage horror flick and so predicted who gets offed next. Jones' prose is so enveloping and descriptive that it's a wonder you can flip through the pages and not get any blood spatter. His writing style is to lead the reader into a darkened room, then "I blow out the candle and let their hand go."

We also saw another side to Jones, revealed by his desire to write a rom-com and perhaps pen the script for a Hallmark Christmas Special (playing it straight, no slashers invited). When asked which character he'd like to be cast as in Pulp Fiction, it was Mia Wallace, played by Uma Thurman.