CANR
WORK TITLE: The Angel of Indian Lake
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.demontheory.net/
CITY: Boulder
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 325
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 22, 1972, in Midland, TX; son of Dennis Jones and Rebecca Graham; married, May 20, 1995; wife’s name Nancy; children: son and daughter.
EDUCATION:Texas Tech University, B.A., 1994; North Texas University, M.A., 1996; Florida State University, Ph.D., 1998.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, former associate professor; University of Colorado, Boulder, Ineva Baldwin Professor of English, 2008—.
MEMBER:Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana.
AWARDS:Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, 2001; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, 2001; Writer’s League of Texas Fellowship in Literature, 2002; First Prize, Literal Latte Short-Short Contest, 2002; Jesse Jones Award for Fiction, Texas Institute of Letters, 2005; This Is Horror Award for novel, 2012, for The Last Final Girl, for short fiction, 2013, for “Three Miles Past,” and for short-story collection, 2014, for After the People Lights Have Gone Off; Novella of the Year Prize, This Is Horror Awards, 2018, for Mapping the Interior; Bram Stoker Awards’ superior achievement in long fiction prize, 2020, for Night of the Mannequins; Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Ficiton, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, 2020, Bram Stoker Awards’ superior achievement in a novel prize, 2020, Novel of the Year Prize, This Is Horror Awards, 2020, and Alex Awards, 2021, all for The Only Good Indians; Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in a novel, 2021, novel prize, Shirley Jackson Awards, 2021, and horror novel prize, Locus Awards, 2022, all for My Heart Is a Chainsaw; American Indian Writers Award, Tulsa Library, 2023.
WRITINGS
Short works are represented in numerous anthologies. Contributor to journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior, Cutback, South Dakota Review, and Sundog.
SIDELIGHTS
American author and educator Stephen Graham Jones combines science fiction, horror, mystery, speculative fiction, and metafiction in his novels and short stories. Born in Texas in 1972, Jones did not set out to become a writer or educator. Of Native American descent, Jones noted on his home page that he “grew up all over Texas, mostly West Texas, mostly in a place too small to even have a post office.” He also stated that his ranching and farming family “told me not to do what they did, to use my head instead of my back.” Though he was an avid reader as a child, Jones was kicked out of schools repeatedly. He was fortunate enough, however, to finish his high school degree in an alternative school and then find a new direction in college, studying philosophy and beginning to write. His first short story was published as he began work on his master’s degree. Jones went on to earn a doctorate in English and to teach at the college level. His first publication, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, was a reworking of his dissertation.
The Fast Red Road is a novel that at once investigates and sends up many of the tropes about Native Americans. Half-blood Pidgin comes back to Clovis, New Mexico—leaving his porn-star job in Utah—in order to bury his father, Cline. Cline’s body is stolen at the funeral, and now Pidgin has a new mission: to retrieve the corpse for burial. He is aided in this quest by Charlie Ward, whose specialty is stealing cars.
The result of the ensuing adventures is both picaresque and somewhat hallucinatory, as Jones portrays Native Americans in a way “cell-phone-eared, SUV-driving stoplight-runners may not get,” according to Kansas City Star reviewer Robert Folsom, who added: “So much … happens: memories come to life, ghosts talk, drug-dealer bagboy doppelgangers must be dealt with.”
Jones’s second published novel, All the Beautiful Sinners, is, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, a “cleverly plotted detective story [infused] with Indian lore.” The novel features the efforts of Deputy Sheriff Jim Doe, stationed in Texas, to capture a criminal known as Tin Man. For over fifteen years Tin Man has terrorized Texas, kidnapping Native American children in pairs right out of their homes. As he typically strikes during tornadoes, Tin Man has filled the Indian community with fear that an old legend about storms assuming malevolent human form might be a reality. As Doe, a Native American himself, hunts his prey across the expanse of Texas, he also deals with his own demons: the mother who abandoned him as a youth and the sister who has been missing for two decades.
The Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Jones “masterfully plays with the serial killer genre” in All the Beautiful Sinners. The reviewer added that the author’s “brisk, clean, visceral prose gives the novel its edgy suspense.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor, however, lamented that this “tale of a serial killer morphs into an incoherent jumble of places, events, and characters.” The contributor concluded: “Followers of Pynchon, et al., may find the surrealism significant. Others will find matters trying and pointless.” Booklist reviewer David Hellman noted that the novel presents “a creepy double pleasure” for readers “who like their mayhem loaded on thick.”
Jones again blends genre tropes with surreal and postmodern fiction in The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto, in which, according to Booklist contributor Donna Seaman, “all natural and narrative laws are suspended.” In this futuristic/surreal suspense novel, government laws restore the prairies’ native flora and fauna—which includes Indians. Thus America’s first people establish in the Dakotas an independent Indian territory. Special Agent Chassis Jones is in search of thirty-nine missing tourists, presumed dead, but does not get much help from the customers of the Fool’s Hip bowling alley. One of the primary suspects, Nickel Eye, keeps his mouth shut under questioning; other characters such as Cat Stand, Back Iron, and LP Deal are representative of the Native Americans who populate this strange new world order.
Seaman had high praise for The Bird Is Gone. She noted: “Jones brilliantly and audaciously critiques the ironies inherent in our frontier mythologies, racial stereotypes, and inchoate longings.”
Jones collects sixteen short stories in his next book, Bleed into Me: A Book of Stories, each of which provides a critique of what it is like to be an Indian in the United States in modern times. In stories such as “Discovering America,” Jones takes the reader into the heart of the Native American experience, at once outsider and first citizen. In that tale a young Indian travels across America only to discover the huge divide that still exists between whites and Indians in the twenty-first century. Drugs and alcohol are also part of the endemic experience in these tales.
Reviewing Bleed into Me for Booklist, Deborah Donovan felt that the author “reveals the sort of casual stereotyping and prejudice that never seems to disappear.”
Jones turns to horror for his 2006 novel, Demon Theory. The book claims to be the novelization of a three-part horror film, which is in turn based on the notes of Dr. Neider. The book comes complete with copious footnotes in a classic postmodern format for fiction. It is Halloween night, and Hale, a medical student, receives an alarming phone call from his diabetic mother. In the company of six of his classmates, Hale returns to the lonely farmhouse where his mother lives and from where his sister disappeared. Once they reach the house, the friends discover that the mother is nowhere to be found. Something is there, though, and this evil presence begins to attack each of the students in turn. Stranded by a snowstorm, the students must try to remain alive throughout the night.
Texas Monthly reviewer Mike Shea had high praise for this “subversive and indispensable” novel, calling it a “madly entertaining landmark of literary horror.” Shea concluded: “There is genius at work here.”
Jones returns to Indian topics in Ledfeather, set on a Blackfeet Indian reservation in Montana. Jones’s novel deals with two time periods at the reservation: one during the contemporary lifetime of the Indian boy Doby Saxon, and the other through the eyes of an Indian agent on the same reservation in the late nineteenth century. The futility of Doby’s life is examined, from a suicide attempt to the death of a close friend. These experiences are echoed in the letter from the Indian agent to his wife recounting how he witnessed a young Indian boy trying to kill himself. “The two stories are tied by characters and emotions, coincidence and magic realism,” noted Booklist reviewer Donovan, who called the work “masterful.”
In an interview with a contributor to Slushpile, Jones was asked whether there were elements of Native American life that he would like to see examined more in fiction. He replied: “Yeah, the element that doesn’t go for drums and suns and bears. Not saying that’s not a part of the culture, just that, always writing about pipes and chants and stuff doesn’t help disabuse non-Indian readers that we aren’t still wearing loincloths. As for elements missing in fiction specifically, I’d say parody first—we need to make fun of ourselves, if for no other reason than to get a jump on everybody else—and next, some kind of reappropriation-fantasy mode. Violent, hostile stuff, that doesn’t pull any punches just to get on the shelves.”
Since the completion of Ledfeather, Jones has written several novels, including Zombie Bake-Off, The Last Final Girl, Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth, and The Gospel of Z. The latter tale is a postapocalyptic zombie novel set ten years after the first zombie sighting. Thirty-something Jory Gray is losing his will to survive, and his only solace is his friend Linse. Jory has been demoted to the rank of Preburial, which means he has only a week to live, and he is on work assignment with the Handlers (zombies who have been modified into tame and helpful cyborgs). When Linse goes missing, he discovers that she has run away to join the church, and Jory decides to find her and bring her back. His ensuing travels lead him to the restricted zone, where he discovers the banned “Gospel of Z.” Jory’s tale switches between his present and his past, and the backstory explains how the restricted zone and nefarious church were formed.
Commending The Gospel of Z in Publishers Weekly, a critic noted that moments of “hilarity provide depth as well as levity.” The critic went on to state that “the flickering humanity of the characters will resonate powerfully.”
With his 2016 novel, Mongrels, Jones offers a new take on the werewolf myth, presenting an unnamed first-person narrator who is born into a family of werewolves. The narrator will transform as he hits puberty, but he suspects he may turn into something other than a werewolf. He suspects this because he has never really fit in with his family. The clan moves from town to town, and the boy does not know his own parents. He is raised by his Uncle Darren and Aunt Libby after his grandfather dies. The episodic story, while driven by the characters’ werewolf nature, is essentially a coming-of-age tale that centers on family in a rural setting.
Discussing the novel’s conception in a Dallas Morning News interview with Jenny Shank, Jones explained that he began working on a few different werewolf stories around the turn of the millennium. “I wrote the first chapter of Mongrels in one afternoon, for an anthology I was invited to be in,” he remarked. “Then I prepped for a werewolf course I was teaching, which involved about four weeks of inhaling every story, movie, and everything I could find about werewolves. My head was so full of werewolf stuff that I started writing the novel. I wrote a skeletal first draft in 14 days or so. But I have been more or less writing this book for about 17 years.”
Commenting on the result in Kirkus Reviews, a critic stated that “the novel has little unifying plot other than a series of interconnected vignettes and the boy’s running commentary on the nature and character of werewolves.” According to online Cultured Vultures correspondent Matthew Brockmeyer: “This meandering feeling lent to the wandering and lost nature of the characters … and as I read I came away with the strong impression that Jones knew exactly what he was doing and this was all on purpose. The beautifully poetic and enigmatic tone of the ending left me convinced, as well as spellbound.” Praising the novel on the This Is Horror website, Bob Pastorella announced: “ Mongrels delivers everything you need in a werewolf story, incorporating all the tropes, paying homage while deconstructing with revisionist perfection, transcending genre to provide one of the most entertaining, heartfelt, mind-blowing novels we’ve read this year.” Echoing this sentiment in the online SciFi Now, Jonathan Hatfull advised: “There are moments of tense action, moments that border on body horror, and sense of melancholy and familial affection that make this superbly written coming of age story the best werewolf novel we’ve read for a long time. You need to read this.”
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In Jones’ standalone novel, The Only Good Indian, four young Native American men on the Blackfeet reservation hunt on forbidden land and kill a small herd of elk, including a pregnant female. Still haunted by the killing ten years later, the men experience visions of the elk calf and act erratically. One believes the elk’s spirit has taken the form of a friend and then his wife, and all the men feel the weight of the elk’s wrath on them. “As Jones makes his bloody way through the character rotation, he indulges in reflections on rural life, community expectations, and family,” noted a Kirkus Review critic. The book “unfolds at a slow and steady pace that offers ample opportunities for sharp commentary on history, past choices and the identity crises of a group of Native American men,” according to G. Robert Frazier in BookPage.
Jones begins “The Indian Lake Trilogy” with My Heart Is a Chainsaw, an homage to slasher films. Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is half-Blackfoot, poor, with an abusive father, and is a pariah in her small town of Proofrock, Idaho. Her only comfort is an encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies and writing essays on the genre for her history teacher. After two tourists are killed, Jade suspects the beginning of a real-life slasher film and predicts not only a massacre on the Fourth of July but also that the new rich girl in town will be the sole Final Girl survivor. Jones also deals with issues of class, power, and addiction.
In an interview with Michelle Lane at Horror Writers Association, Jones explained what drew him to the horror genre: “The stakes are high and operatic… I like that horror is one of two genres [with romance/erotica] … that can elicit a visceral response.” Reviewing the book, Booklist critic Becky Stratford declared: “In this methodically paced story, every detail both entertains and matters, and the expertly rendered setting explodes with violent action.” In Library Journal, a reviewer noted: “The tension builds to a horrifying climax with all the gore Jade could ever have hoped for and ends on an uncertain, supernatural note.”
In the second book of the series, Don’t Fear the Reaper, Jade, now going by the name Jennifer, returns to Proofrock, Idaho, four years later, after her conviction is overturned and she’s released from prison. Meanwhile legendary serial killer Dark Mill South escapes from prison and heads to Proofrock for a killing spree, seeking revenge for the murder of 38 Dakota men hanged in 1862. Jade uses her knowledge of slasher films and gathers her friends to stop the killer. “Jones expertly blends snappy graveyard humor with nail-biting suspense, and he gives his characters distinctive personalities,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Becky Spratford in Booklist called the book “A superior example of twenty-first-century horror with a strong, emotionally heartfelt core where every detail matters.”
The Angel of Indian Lake, the final installment of the series, finds Jade returning to Proofrock, Idaho, four years later and working as a history teacher at her former high school. She believes that the curse of the Lake Witch, known as the Angel, is responsible for new and familiar horrors facing the town: a wildfire started by a game warden, the death of local teenagers, a serial killer cult, the ghost of Jade’s dead father, and rich investors buying up land. “This is a worthy finale to a series that has expanded the horizons of contemporary horror,” noted a Publishers Weekly critic, while a writer in Kirkus Reviews declared: “The writing is still boxing-match ferocious and precise.”
Keeping with the horror theme, Jones’ I Was a Teenage Slasher follows 17-year-old Tolly Driver in 1989 in Lamesa, Texas, who is infected by the zombie of a high school student killed in a prank perpetrated by the cool kids at a party. The infection causes Tolly to go on a killing spree attacking his fellow classmates. Tolly writes the events in his autobiography, paying homage to the slasher flicks of the 1980s and ’90s. Jones spoke with Ayesha Rascoe on Weekend Edition Sunday about Tolly’s dilemma: “He wants to give people a pass, but he has to fulfill the mission of a slasher… to pay these people back with a lot of interest. In the slasher world, brutal fairness is the order of the day.” Acknowledging that the plot is preposterous but Jones enjoys playing with horror movie tropes, Christopher Bollen remarked in New York Times Book Review that what makes readers follow Tolly “is his spectacularly engaging narrative voice, which is imbued with a street-smart lyricism that makes even the loftiest observations glitter like knife blades.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Indian Culture and Research Journal, spring, 2004, Robert L. Berner, review of The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto, p. 142.
Booklist, April 15, 2003, David Hellman, review of All the Beautiful Sinners, p. 1448; August 1, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of The Bird Is Gone, p. 1954; September 1, 2005, Deborah Donovan, review of Bleed into Me: A Book of Stories, p. 64; September 1, 2008, Deborah Donovan, review of Ledfeather, p. 48; June 1, 2021, Becky Spratford, review of My Heart Is a Chainsaw, p. 54; December 1, 2022, Becky Spratford, review of Don’t Fear the Reaper, p. 114; June 1, 2024, Suzanne Temple, review of The Angel of Indian Lake, p. 102; May 18, 2024, Becky Spratford, review of I Was a Teenage Slasher, p. 23.
BookPage, July 2020, G. Robert Frazier, review of The Only Good Indians, p. 20.
California Bookwatch, March, 2015, review of After the People Lights Have Gone Off.
Choice, June, 2001, B. Hans, review of The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, p. 1795.
Dallas Morning News, May 20, 2016, Jenny Shank, author interview.
Kansas City Star, February 14, 2001, review of The Fast Red Road.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2003, review of All the Beautiful Sinners, p. 336; March 1, 2016, review of Mongrels; March 15, 2020, review of The Only Good Indians; March 15, 2024, review of The Angel of Indian Lake.
Library Journal, December 2021, review of My Heart Is a Chainsaw, p. 54; June 2024, James Gardner, review of The Angel of Indian Lake, p. 52; July 2024, Lila Denning, review of I Was a Teenage Slasher, p. 91.
New York Times Book Review, August 25, 2024, Christopher Bollen, review of I Was a Teenage Slasher, p. 16.
Publishers Weekly, May 5, 2003, review of All the Beautiful Sinners, p. 198; June 27, 2005, review of Bleed into Me, p. 37; November 25, 2013, review of The Gospel of Z, p. 37; August 25, 2014, review of Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly; October 24, 2022, B. J. Robbins, review of Don’t Fear the Reaper, p. 61; January 29, 2024, review of The Angel of Indian Lake, p. 40; May 20, 2024, review of I Was a Teenage Slasher, p. 51.
School Library Journal, December 2021, Lindsay Jensen, review of My Heart Is a Chainsaw, p. 101.
Texas Monthly, April, 2006, Mike Shea, review of Demon Theory, p. 56.
ONLINE
Cultured Vultures, https://culturedvultures.com/ (March 10, 2017), Matthew Brockmeyer, review of Mongrels.
Demon Theory website, http://www.demontheory.net (June 12, 2014).
Horror Writers Association, https://horror.org/ (November 7, 2023), Michelle Lane, “Indigenous Heritage in Horror Month: Interview with Stephen Graham Jones.”
SciFi Now, https://www.scifinow.co.uk/ (March 10, 2017), Jonathan Hatfull, review of Mongrels.
Slushpile, http://www.slushpile.net/ (July 1, 2005), interview with Stephen Graham Jones.
Stephen Graham Jones Home Page, http://www.stephengrahamjones.net (March 12, 2010).
This Is Horror, http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/ (April 27, 2016), Bob Pastorella, review of Mongrels.
University of Colorado, English Department website, https://english.colorado.edu/ (June 12, 2014), “Stephen Graham Jones.”
University of Colorado website, http://www.colorado.edu/ (March 10, 2016), author profile.
Velvet, http://welcometothevelvet.com/ (September 21, 2008), Jesse Lawrence, interview with Stephen Graham Jones.
Weekend Edition Sunday, www.npr.org/ (July 14, 2024), Ayesha Rascoe, “Stephen Graham Jones on His Novel ‘I Was a Teenage Slasher.’”
Westword, http://www.westword.com/ (May 3, 2016), Jason Heller, author profile and interview.
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Stephen Graham Jones
(b.1972)
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of eight novels and two collections. Stephen's been a Shirley Jackson Award finalist three times, a Bram Stoker Award finalist, a Black Quill Award finalist, an International Horror Guild finalist, a Colorado Book Award Finalist, a Texas Monthly Book Selection, and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction. He's also been a Texas Writers League Fellow and an NEA fellow in fiction. His short fiction has been in Cemetery Dance, Asimov's, Weird Tales, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, etc., as well as all the journals: Open City, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Literal Latte, Cutbank, and on and on, some hundred and thirty stories, total, through every letter of the alphabet.
Though Blackfeet, Stephen was born in 1972 in West Texas. This is often confusing, as most Blackfeet are in Montana and he grew up working from tractors and horses and in all kinds of welding and automotive shops. There was also lots of hunting and basketball and various scrapes with the law. After getting his PhD from Florida State University in a record two years, Stephen, twenty-eight then, went to work in the warehouse at Sear's (all he ever planned), but injuries forced him into teaching. And it's not a bad life, being a professor. Stephen made full professor at thirty-six--likely the youngest full prof in the humanities at The University of Colorado at Boulder (and maybe all of Colorado) and is into fiction, comics, film, screenwriting, and anything horror or fantasy, western or science fiction. Or, just anything that tells an interesting story in an interesting way.
Awards: Jackson (2021), Stoker (2021), LA Times (2020) see all
Genres: Horror, Fantasy
New and upcoming books
July 2024
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I Was a Teenage Slasher
March 2025
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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Series
Jade Daniels
1. My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021)
2. Don't Fear the Reaper (2023)
3. The Angel of Indian Lake (2024)
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Novels
The Fast Red Road (2000)
All the Beautiful Sinners (2003)
The Bird Is Gone (2003)
Seven Spanish Angels (2005)
Demon Theory (2006)
Ledfeather (2008)
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti (2008)
It Came from del Rio (2010)
Zombie Bake-Off (2012)
Growing Up Dead in Texas (2012)
The Last Final Girl (2012)
Flushboy (2013)
The Least of My Scars (2013)
The Gospel of Z (2014)
Not for Nothing (2014)
The Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly (2014) (with Paul Tremblay)
Mongrels (2016)
The Only Good Indians (2019)
I Was a Teenage Slasher (2024)
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025)
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Collections
Bleed Into Me (2005)
The Ones That Got Away (2010)
Three Miles Past (2013)
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth (2013)
States of Grace (2014)
After the People Lights Have Gone Off (2014)
The Faster Redder Road (2015)
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Novellas and Short Stories
The Elvis Room (2014)
Sterling City (2014)
Mapping the Interior (2017)
Attack of the 50 Foot Indian (2020)
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Series contributed to
Tor.Com Original
Chapter Six (2014)
The Night Cyclist (2016)
Night of the Mannequins (2020)
Wait for Night (2020)
Men, Women, and Chainsaws (2022)
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Rewind or Die
1. The Midnight Exhibit Vol. 1 (2020) (with others)
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Trespass collection
3. The Backbone of the World (2022)
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Heroic Legends
Conan: Lord of the Mount (2023)
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Graphic Novels hide
Memorial Ride (2021)
Stephen Graham Jones
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones, late 2019
Stephen Graham Jones, late 2019
Born January 22, 1972 (age 52)
Midland, Texas, U.S.
Occupation Writer, Ineva Baldwin Professor of English at University of Colorado
Education
Texas Tech University (BA)
University of North Texas (MA)
Florida State University (PhD)
Genre Horror fiction
Stephen Graham Jones (born January 22, 1972)[1] is a Blackfeet Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction,[2] crime fiction, and science fiction.[3][4][5] His works include the horror novels The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Night of the Mannequins.
Jones is the Ineva Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado, where he has been a faculty member since 2008.[6][7]
Background
Stephen Graham Jones was born in Midland, Texas, on January 22, 1972, to Dennis Jones and Rebecca Graham.[1] He is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana.[8]
Jones's enthusiasm for reading began at the early age of 11, however, as a boy he had aspirations to be a farmer, never a teacher or a writer. After completing a semester of college, Jones decided to continue to pursue his degree while still having the intention to return to a manual labor job post-grad.[9]
Jones received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy from Texas Tech University in 1994, a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of North Texas in 1996, and his Ph.D. in 1998 from Florida State University.[10]
After graduating with his Ph.D. in 1998, Jones worked in a warehouse in Texas until a back injury sentenced him to a desk job. Jones worked at the Texas Tech Library until going on to teach at Texas Tech University and the University of West Texas.[11]
Writing career
[icon]
This section needs expansion with: more details. You can help by adding to it. (November 2021)
Jones at a 2014 book signing
While he was attending Florida State University, Jones's dissertation director introduced him to Houghton-Mifflin editor Jane Silver at the Writers' Harvest conference. Jones pitched her a novel which he had not yet written, and Silver liked the idea. Jones then wrote the book, The Fast Red Road, as his dissertation. It was published as his debut novel in 2000.[12] It was followed by All the Beautiful Sinners in 2003.
In 2002, Jones won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction.[13] In 2006, he won the Jesse Jones Award for Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters for his 2005 short story collection Bleed Into Me.[14] He won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction for Mapping the Interior in 2017.[15]
The Only Good Indians, a horror novel, was published on July 14, 2020, through Saga Press and Titan Books.[16] It won the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction in 2020.[17] Jones won two 2020 Bram Stoker Awards for Night of the Mannequins and The Only Good Indians.[18]
Jones contributed an X-Men story to Marvel Comics' Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1 anthology, release in November 2020. Joining him was artist David Cutler.[19]
Themes and style
Jones has acknowledged a debt to Native American Renaissance writers, especially Gerald Vizenor.[20] Scholar Cathy Covell Waegner describes Jones's work as containing elements of "dark playfulness, narrative inventiveness, and genre mixture."[20] Jones also cites the novels of Louis L'Amour as an influence on his development as a writer, stating that "For better or worse, those pulp westerns are now part of my DNA as a writer."[21]
Joseph Gaudet cited Jones' writing as "post-ironic" or representative of David Foster Wallace's "New Sincerity," a literary approach "emerging in response to the cynicism, detachment, and alienation that many saw as defining the postmodern canon," seeking instead "to more patently embrace morality, sincerity, and an 'ethos of belief.'[22] His eighth novel, Ledfeather, which Jones stated was the most widely taught of his books,[23] is used as Gaudet's primary example.
Jones has a natural inclination towards the sentimental and speculates that the dark and chilling nature of his writing is an overcorrection on his part. Jones enjoys the constant escalation of the bizarre but uses humor to release building pressure in order to build anticipation once more for the reader. Jones’ novels can be described as Native American Gothic, or Rez Gothic: a niche publishing genre characterized as using fantasy, science fiction and horror to shed light on racial inequalities such as the one referenced through Jones’ novel title The Only Good Indians.[24]
Personal life
Jones and his wife Nancy married on May 20, 1995. They have two children together.
Jones resides in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, son and daughter. He teaches at the University of Colorado as the Ineva Reilly Baldwin Endowed Chair. Jones enjoys returning to northern Montana in July to attend the Blackfeet Nation Pow Wow and in November for the annual Montana Blackfeet elk hunt. This annual elk hunt inspired Jones’ novel The Only Good Indians. [25]
Awards
Awards for Jones's writing[26]
Year Title Award Result Ref.
2007 "Raphael" International Horror Guild Award for Short Fiction Nominee
2009 The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti Shirley Jackson Award for Novella Nominee
2010 "Lonegan's Luck" Shirley Jackson Award for Novelette Nominee
2011 The Ones That Got Away Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection Finalist [27]
Shirley Jackson Award for Collection Nominee
2015 After the People Lights Have Gone Off Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection Nominee [28]
Shirley Jackson Award for Collection Nominee
2016 Mongrels Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel Finalist [29]
2017 Mapping the Interior Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction Winner [30][31]
Mongrels Locus Award for Best Horror Novel 9th
Shirley Jackson Award for Novel Nominee
"The Night Cyclist" Shirley Jackson Award for Novelette Nominee
2018 Mapping the Interior Shirley Jackson Award for Novel Nominee
World Fantasy Award—Novella Nominee
2020 Night of the Mannequins Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction Winner [32][33]
Shirley Jackson Award for Novella Winner [34][35]
The Only Good Indians Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel Winner [36][37]
Shirley Jackson Award for Novel Winner [34][35]
2021 My Heart is a Chainsaw Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel Winner [38][39]
Night of the Mannequins Shirley Jackson Award, Novella Winner
The Only Good Indians British Fantasy Award for Horror Novel Nominee
Dragon Award for Horror Novel Nominee
Ignyte Award for Adult Novel Nominee
World Fantasy Award—Novel Finalist
Locus Award for Best Horror Novel 2nd
"Wait for Night" Locus Award for Best Short Story 10th
2022 My Heart Is a Chainsaw British Fantasy Award for Horror Novel Nominee
Dragon Award for Horror Novel Nominee
Locus Award for Best Horror Novel Winner
Shirley Jackson Award for Novel Winner [40][41]
Selected works
Books
The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong. Fiction Collective 2. 2000. ISBN 978-1573660884.
All the Beautiful Sinners. Rugged Land. 2003. ISBN 978-1590710081.
The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto. Fiction Collective 2. 2003. ISBN 978-1573661096.
Seven Spanish Angels. Dzanc. 2005. ASIN B005D7V6NA.
Bleed into Me: A Book of Stories. Native Storiers: A series of American Narratives. University of Nebraska Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0803226050.
Demon Theory. MacAdam/Cage. 2006. ISBN 978-1596921641.
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti. Chiasmus Press. 2008. ISBN 978-0981502748.
Ledfeather. Fiction Collective 2. 2008. ISBN 978-1573661461.
It Came From Del Rio. Trapdoor Books. 2010. ISBN 978-1936500017.
The Ones that Got Away. Prime Books. 2011. ISBN 978-1607013211.
The Last Final Girl. Lazy Fascist Press. 2012. ISBN 978-1621050513.
Growing Up Dead in Texas. MP Publishing Ltd. 2012. ISBN 978-1849821544.
Zombie Bake-Off. Lazy Fascist. 2012. ISBN 978-1621050193.
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth. Lazy Fascist. 2013. ISBN 978-1621050995.
Three Miles Past. Nightscape. 2013. ISBN 978-1938644078.
The Least of My Scars. Broken River Books. 2013. ISBN 978-1940885001.
States of Grace. SpringGun Press. 2014. ISBN 978-0983221883.
Flushboy. Dzanc Books. 2013. ISBN 978-1938604171.
Not for Nothing. Dzanc Books. 2014. ISBN 978-1938604539.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off. Dark House Press. 2014. ISBN 978-1940430256.
The Gospel of Z. Samhain. 2014. ISBN 978-1619218116.
My Hero. Hex Publishers. 2016. ISBN 978-0998666709.
Mongrels. HarperCollins Publishers. 2016. ISBN 978-0062412690.
Mapping the Interior. Tor Books. 2017. ISBN 978-0765395108.
Night of the Mannequins. Tor.com. 2020. ISBN 9781250752079.[42]
The Only Good Indians. Saga, Simon & Schuster. 2020. ISBN 9781982136451.
My Heart is a Chainsaw. Saga Press, Simon & Schuster. 2021. ISBN 9781982137632.
Don't Fear the Reaper. Saga, Simon & Schuster. 2023. ISBN 978-1982186593.
The Angel of Indian Lake. Saga, Simon & Schuster. 2024. ISBN 978-1668011669.
I Was a Teenage Slasher. Saga Press, Simon & Schuster. 2024. ISBN 978-1668022245.
Under the pseudonym P. T. Jones
P. T. Jones; Paul Tremblay (2014). Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly. ChiTeen, ChiZine Publications. ISBN 9781771481731.
Short stories
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (September 2021)
"Captain's Lament". Clarkesworld. No. 17. February 2008.
"How Billy Hanson Destroyed the Planet Earth, and Everyone on It". Juked. April 1, 2009.
Jones, Stephen Graham (2012). "Little Lambs". In VanderMeer, Jeff; VanderMeer, Ann (eds.). The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Reprint ed.). Tor Books. ISBN 978-0765333605.
Sterling City. Nightscape. 2013. ISBN 9781938644160.
The Elvis Room. This is Horror. 2014. ISBN 9780957548152.
"Brushdogs". Nightmare Magazine. No. 58. 2014.
"Men, Women, and Chainsaws." Tor.com. 2022. ISBN 9781250850874.
Comics
Earthdivers, no. 1– (October 2022–present). IDW Publishing.[43]
'Dear Final Girls' (2019) art by Jolyon Yates, originally published in the Horror Special issue of 'Wicked Awesome tales' edited by Todd Jones.[44]
BIO
So, if you need a bio from me, here’s the basic one, which I’ll try to keep updated. Can’t seem to get the titles to go properly italics, but surely you can fix that:
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of some thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are The Angel of Indian Lake, I Was a Teenage Slasher, and the ongoing Earthdivers. Up before too long are True Believers and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
That’s usually plenty, and the right size for magazines and journals and sites, I think. If I’m needing to duck into a program or schedule or something, though, then those tend to be about this size:
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, WLA’s Distinguished Achievement Award, ALA’s RUSA Award and Alex Award, the 2023 American Indian Festival of Words Writers Award, the Locus Award, four Bram Stoker Awards, three Shirley Jackson Awards, six This is Horror Awards, and he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Eisner Award. He’s also made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels, and is the guy who wrote Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw, Earthdivers, andI Was a Teenage Slasher. Up next are True Believers and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Feel free to mix & match/cutnpaste these two into some Frankenstein-bio, too, of course. Or completely make one up. I’m like John Locke: all possible bios pretty much apply, sure. And, if you need to list where I teach and who I am there:
Ivena Baldwin Professor of English, University of Colorado at Boulder
And if you need a link for me, either/both of these’ll do:
http://stephengrahamjones.com (that’s this place)
https://twitter.com/SGJ72 (@SGJ72)
And, if you need to know how to pronounce my name:
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Pronouns: he/him. Last name: “Jones” (I don’t go by “Graham,” in spite of every hotel and airline being pretty sure I should, as, evidently, “Stephen” is a failure of a name, “Graham” is so much better. but? it’s just my middle name. I wouldn’t even be using it, except, when I came on the scene back in the early 2000s, there was already a “Stephen Jones.” oh, and, as I was raised by a mom who jumped straight down anyone’s throat who ever even sounded like they might have called me “Steve,” I don’t go by that, either. and, yes, it’s always with the “ph” in the middle, like a litmus test)
And, if you need a count of my books . . . I think forty? But one of those (13th Night) is a single-issue standalone comic book. And one of these is a critical edition—has my face on front, but Billy Stratton did the book. Same with The Faster, Redder Road: that’s Theo Van Alst. Anyway, click to enbiggenate:
Stephen Graham Jones
Titles
My Heart is a Chainsaw
The Only Good Indians
Mapping the Interior
Night of the Mannequins
Mongrels
Bio
Stephen Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians and numerous other novels, novellas, and short stories. He has been an NEA fellowship recipient and has won several awards including the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the Alex Award from American Library Association. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Stephen Graham Jones on Trilogies, Deaths, Slashers, and Dog Nipples
Author photo via Wikipedia Commons
Stephen Graham Jones is a literary superstar. He's also a nice guy who's been doing this thing for a long time, so a lot of us celebrate his success. You know, because for anyone who's been a SGJ fan from the beginning, seeing the world finally giving him the props he deserves is an absolute pleasure. In any case, Don’t Fear the Reaper, the second book in the Indian Lake Trilogy, is out now from Gallery/Saga Press, so I thought it'd be cool to have a chat with Stephen about his writing, Jade Daniels, recent reads, a few movies, and some other stuff. Here's what he had to say.
Last year we hung out in Estes Park...and then you got Covid. Then we hung out in Connecticut...and you got Covid again. How are you doing, man? How's the tour going?
Tour’s going great. Different city every day, but all the venues are different enough that they’re not smearing into a single event. Great moderators, wonderful crowds, excellent questions at every place, and I’m leaving empty pens behind me from all the signing. It’s the dream, right? It is exhausting, some nights it’s just two or three hours sleep before the next flight, but when it’s time to go on-stage, I’m never tired, always invigorated to share Don’t Fear the Reaper. Been such an honor, all the people showing up—all the readers, ready to slam through a few hundred pages with Jade Daniels again. Many of them wearing that cool t-shirt. And I’ve found a few burritos along the way, to keep me going. Can’t ask for anything more.
All other art’s this complete mystery to me. But not storytelling. Not writing. It’s what I can do, when I’m lucky. So it’s what I’ll keep doing.
You went from standalones to a trilogy. I'm guessing you haven't spent as much time with a character as you've spent/are spending with Jade Daniels. What makes Jade so special?
You’re right—I’ve never hung with a character for this many installments. But it’s really cool, getting to watch her develop over three books. The hard part, I think? It’s going to be letting her go. She’ll always be out there, though. Fighters and dreamers like her, they’re always there. I’ve been lucky, across all these years, to meet a few good characters in my pages. L.P. Deal from The Bird is Gone. Darren from Mongrels. Denorah from The Only Good Indians. Sawyer from Night of the Mannequins. Emily from Earthdivers. And now Jade. She just sort of stood up from the waters of Indian Lake, one revision, her eyes already open, and then she upped her chin to me, walked into the story with her hands already balled into fists by her legs. It’s been all I can do to keep up.
I think you reinvented slashers with My Heart is a Chainsaw and continue to leave your mark in the genre with Don't Fear the Reaper. What is it about slashers that makes them so much fun to read?
To me the slasher is a coin flipping through the air. On one side, there’s a scream, and on the other side, there’s a laugh, and, with the slasher, you never know which it’s going to land on in any given moment. I think that’s the appeal, moment by moment. Stepping back a bit, though, I think that engaging a justice fantasy, which is what the slasher is, it...it doesn’t quite heal us or anything, but it does give us hope, I think. That the world can be fair. That justice can prevail. That the bad people don’t always get to win. Sometimes one final girl, who’s been running away the whole story, she’ll turn around, and she’ll face the horror down. And that can be all of us.
A lot of us have been reading you since The Fast Red Road and All the Beautiful Sinners. Your career has been amazing, but it exploded in recent years. You've always done what you want, so what do you think finally made everyone pay attention?
Wish I knew? But, it does all coincide with signing on with my agent, B.J. Robbins. The first book we did together was Mongrels. When she and I were talking about working together, she sort of laid down the law, told me that writing like the page is on fire isn’t enough—you also have to strategize, think about career-level stuff. So I handed all that over to her, and it’s been great ever since. But? I wouldn’t trade all the years before for anything. It was where I got to learn. It was when I got to play. I think years like that are so important. You figure out that you’re going to write whether the audience and the critics are there or not—you’re a writer, fiction’s how you make sense of the world, and you don’t need permission, you just do it anyway, whether anyone’s watching or not.
You're ridiculously prolific. At this point, what keeps you going?
I just love it, man. Playing with dragons. Hiding from the world. On the page, I can make things make sense. Things in this real world, they never quite add up for me. But in a story, they can, if I do things just right. So I try and try harder to get those things as right as I can. Because I so want things to make sense. And I also want people to feel things as deeply as I do. I mean, I’m nothing special in that regard, everybody’s feeling are big to them, we’re all perpetual teenagers like that, and that’s wonderful, but...I have written enough words and read enough amazing work that I can sometimes get lucky, and come up with a way to package a feeling or a thought up so that, when the reader unwraps it, they can feel that same exact thing I feel. And that’s magic, pure and simple. It’s as close as we can get to telepathy, I figure. I love to be involved with it. And I can’t imagine doing anything else. I listen to music, and can’t imagine how them cats do that. I study photography, and can’t begin to understand how beautiful stuff like that happens. All other art’s this complete mystery to me. But not storytelling. Not writing. It’s what I can do, when I’m lucky. So it’s what I’ll keep doing.
Talking books with you is always fun, but so is talking movies. What ten films would you say go really well with Don't Fear the Reaper?
Ten, nice. Scream, of course. Halloween, the 1978 one. Maybe...maybe Friday the 13th IV: The Last Chapter. It’s got that screechy kind of operatic delivery to it that I really engage. Definitely A Nightmare on Elm Street—probably one and three, say? Which brings us to five. And to one that’s not a slasher, not on the horror shelf at all: Ordinary People. I think that’s in Don’t Fear the Reaper. It’s probably in everything I try to do, really. And, on the horror shelf but not really a slasher, both You’re Next and Ready or Not—all the violence, a lot of laughs, and just gallons of blood splashing around. And let’s round it out in science fiction: Alien and Terminator 2. Ripley and Sarah Connor, man, they’re Jade’s kind of resilient, aren’t they? And, like Jade, they’re always up against the impossible. And that’s where the good stories come from.
Your books are so much fun to read that I think some folks forget they're incredibly deep and full of themes like memory, identity, and the contemporary Native American experience. How much attention do you pay to those themes and how much of it just comes to you organically?
Just percolates up whether I want it or not. I just go into things wanting to get the adrenaline pumping even more, and pull on every heartstring I can reach. All the other stuff, it just happens all on its own. Writers, I mean, same as anybody, we’ve all got our axes to grind, of course. Petty resentments, justifiable hostilities—the whole package that makes a person a person. And, whatever story I write, all the stuff finds a way in. Just, if it ever becomes a controlling force, then you’re dancing close to some big dangerous void, I think. The story’s got to be the prime thing. The character—the Jade at the center of things, she’s the most important. And, I mean, stories aren’t going to solve anything, I know that. But the right story told in the right way, it can start a conversation. It can ask a question in an enduring way. But you got to never forget to entertain, first and foremost. If it’s not fun, it’s junk, I say.
You get asked to blurb a lot of stuff and get to a surprising amount of it given your writing output. What have you read recently that should be on readers' radars?
CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly. Single most amazing book I’ve read in a while. Catriona Ward’s Looking Glass Sound. It’s got these nested narratives that kind of make the readerly rug you’re standing on pretty unstable, in the best way. I’m currently reading Jim Terry’s Come Home, Indio, and really digging it. And? Whatever you’ve got up next, man.
Thanks for that! No pressure now...hah. Anyway, will you write more trilogies after you're done with this one? Does your approach change at all when the story's arc is so big?
It does change a bit, yeah. Well. I should qualify that: My Heart is a Chainsaw was intended to be a standalone, until my editor at Saga, Joe Monti, got me to maybe not just kill every single person in the book. That’s when it became a trilogy. But the rule I gave myself for Reaper, it was that I couldn’t hold anything back, I couldn’t save anything for the third installment. The reader picks up on that, I mean, they can sense you’re withholding some of the good stuff. So I made myself give away everything I could, so that, at the end of Reaper, I could be absolutely empty, and have to do with the third book what I did with Reaper: Sift through the ashes of Chainsaw’s narrative and try to delicately tease up a narrative thread, and then hang scenes and people off it such that it can become a book. But, backing off a bit from the trilogy, what I’ve learned is that book 1 is of course Act 1—how I never saw this before, I don’t know—book 2’s Act 2, and book 3’s the loudest of them all, with its Act 3 showdown. This trilogy’s taught me a lot. And, yeah, I kind of do hope to use it again. No hard plans now, but, I mean, I’ve got this new tray of tools in my toolbox, right? I don’t always look what I’m grabbing onto, when I reach into that box. I imagine, at some point, I latch onto a book 1 again, and try to see where it goes.
This one is for those who KNOW: What's the role of dog nipples in contemporary literature?
Ha. “Good Times,” right? That flash fiction that opens my collection Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth. In that story, they indicate—or “encompass?”—loneliness, regret, but also a sort of tactical satisfaction. And, it always feel weird, and weirdly fun, to read that one to a crowd of the unsuspecting.
Any parting words or favorite kills?
My favorite kill in cinema’s got to be that peephole kill in Dario Argento’s Opera. Favorite one on the page...I might go with the end of Nathan Ballingrud’s The Visible Filth chapbook, which is Wounds, now, after the film. That’s brutal and gory—two essential components—but it’s also touching, and tender, and hopeful. You can hear the bone creaking, then cracking, and you can taste the wrongness in your own mouth, thanks to the precise, evocative language. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, though, so I’ll stop there, let Nathan take your hand, lead you into that particular darkness.
Get My Heart is a Chainsaw at Bookshop or Amazon
Get Don't Fear the Reaper at Bookshop or Amazon
Indigenous Heritage in Horror Month: Interview with Stephen Graham Jones
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Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of some thirty novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Most recent are Don’t Fear the Reaper and the ongoing Earthdivers. Up before too long are The Angel of Indian Lake and I Was a Teenage Slasher. Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
What inspired you to start writing?
I’ve been a storyteller ever since the first time I spilled kool-aid on the couch and had to explain to mom how my little brother had maliciously done this, and was probably setting me up to take the fall, and if we let this continue, he might grow up to be an evil genius and pour baking soda and hydrogen peroxide into a dormant volcano and blow up the world, so, all things considered—especially my obvious innocence—it was probably best to let me skate, so far as this stain was concerned. As for what inspired me to start writing at nineteen, it was probably this guy in an ICU bed I kept watching wake up and pull all his cable and lines out, trying to fight to get back to his son.
What was it about the horror genre that drew you to it?
The stakes are high and operatic, and that makes my heart beat. I like that horror is one of two genres—the other being romance/erotica (I know there’s a line there, but it’s hazy, and the lights are all dialed down in this genre anyway, it’s hard to see it)—that can elicit a visceral response.
Do you make a conscious effort to include indigenous characters and themes in your writing and if so, what do you want to portray?
Don’t have to. The base, default setting for me is “Native.” Anything else feels like a deviation, where I have to start being careful not to overstep, assume things I got no right to be assuming, much less writing.
What has writing horror taught you about the world and yourself?
That the dark is populated. And that I can be digested.
How have you seen the horror genre change over the years? And how do you think it will continue to evolve?
More chances are being taken, yeah. Formal chances, I mean. There’s weird stuff happening, and that’s the garage-band DNA any genre needs to stay vital. I don’t know what the next evolution of horror might be, but I hope to be here for it, anyway, as a reader, maybe a writer, if I can keep up.
How do you feel the indigenous community has been represented thus far in the genre and what hopes do you have for representation in the genre going forward?
Guess my big hope is that we stop being coin-drop characters—the person the main crew shuffles up because of our hair, our skin color, our name, our tribal designation, whatever, and, essentially, drops a quarter in our mouth so we can recount some “ancient” story associated with this place, this current evilness. After which that coin-drop character fades back into the background. Which is just where America likes us. I mean, it’s where it likes us to be if it can’t completely erase us, and till us into the soil, and overwrite our image, our culture, while using our names for everything, as if that makes it all right.
Who are some indigenous horror authors you recommend our audience check out?
Owl Goingback. Erika Wurth. Theo Van Alst. Shane Hawk. Andrea Rogers. Waubgeshig Rice. Man, there’s so many more of us, too, in horror and in all the other genres. I’m already wincing from the names I’m forgetting. But, in short? We don’t all write about hawks being symbolic in the sky, and we don’t speak in Red English. But we do have certain feelings about how our word processors always capitalize “america.”
What is one piece of advice you would give horror authors today?
Write about what scares you, not about what’s generally scary, or what’s hot right now. Get your nightmares down on the page in the way only you can, and then they have a chance to infect the sleep of everyone else.
And to the indigenous writers out there who are just getting started, what advice would you give them?
https://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/article/view/266/900
November 7, 2023Michelle Lane
Stephen Graham Jones. Mapping the Interior . New York. Tor. 2017.112 pages.
American history is an atlas of the psychocultural scars that transformed indigenous people's autochthonous relations with the land into the measured/measurable marks of settler-colonialism. It's no wonder, then, that mapping is the obsession of the preteen protagonist in Stephen Graham Jones's Mapping the Interior , a novella about an Indian family: Junior, his seizure-prone brother, Dino, and mom and dad. Only dad's dead, or rather, coming slowly back to life beneath the house, which Junior maps above and below, in this dimension and that of the sleepwalker, in order to track down his father and try to fix his family, only to learn that it was never broken.
Jones's novella unfolds like a horror remix of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian . At first, Junior sees dad as a ghost walking through the house; over time the ghost becomes physical, organic. Dad appears not as he was, a high-school dropout cycled into poverty and crime, but as the fancy dancer he dreamed of being. But Junior discovers that dad is rematerializing by feeding nightly on Dino's life force. Dino's seizures, Junior surmises, are caused by dad's vampirism, his selfish eating up of the past to build a new self for another life. Love becomes contempt, and Junior murders dad's ghost, saving his family. In the process, he discovers that structures, like the boundaries of life and death, are mutable.
Through agitated prose that mates the self-assured cockiness of preteens with their angsty second-guessing, Jones's novella maps cycles of poverty, violence, and colonialism; of place, space, and time; of genre; of the expectations placed on contemporary Native authors--of being (and being made to be) Indian. Junior shows us in the end that life as a colonized subject is an agglomeration of these cycles, each with their own grooves and ruts, yes, but also possibilities, like that of the powwow circuit, for reinvention, however small, waiting to be charted. Mapping the Interior is thus a masterful critique of time, place, and memory in (post/ de)colonial contexts that surfaces questions urgent for Native literature, horror fiction, and American history.
Jones explores the decidedly pan-Indian, a shared experience of colonization, while also articulating the local, the specific, the totally Jonesian. The Blackfeet author rallies the biting edge of experimental fiction and horror's capacity for unsettling boundaries between real/unreal, human/nonhuman, possible/impossible to reveal a family narrative that dances to life despite the (un)death and pain witnessed by Junior, despite confronting the meaning and need of sacrifice.
Sean Guynes
Michigan State University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
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Guynes, Sean. "Stephen Graham Jones. Mapping the Interior." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2017, pp. 70+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A502351924/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2ad6a9d8. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
In Jones's The Only Good Indians (Saga, May; reviewed on p. 181), four friends from the Blackfeet Nation, who have moved away from the reservation, fight an elk-shaped entity that wants revenge for something they did during a hunt before they left.
What inspired this story? I've been hunting since I was a kid and the idea of ethical hunting is always a thing. Your conception of what constitutes an ethical hunt can be compromised at the last day or two of the hunt.
The characters are hunted by an elkheaded demon. Why this particular animal? When we go out hunting, we usually go out for elk. Elk, to me and to most of my family as well, just tastes the best, so the elk is always the goal. I guess moose would probably be good too, but on the reservation it's hard to get a moose tag. It's a lottery and only a few people get that every year. But there's plenty of elk, and if you get an elk then you're eating good for a good long while.
The novel has a wonderful mix of darkness and humor. How did you balance those elements? I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with one of the slasher genre's many roots, which I would consider to be Scooby-Doo. The spooky parts are always counterbalanced by Shaggy and Scooby doing ridiculous stuff. Horror, in a larger sense, needs to have those little punctuation points of humor. What they are is release valves. Horror is always scarier, scarier, scarier--but if you don't allow the reader a release valve to reset, then the horror gets screechy and just kind of plateaus. So the audience needs to climb and climb, then reset with a laugh, then climb and climb, then reset with a laugh.
What insights do you hope readers come away with?
That we all think we can outrun our past and that the things we did in our 20s aren't going to hit us in our 30s or 40s, but they do. Once you've compromised yourself in whatever way, it's hard to outrun that. In the world of the slasher genre, all bad deeds are punished. [The characters] aren't really bad guys; I kind of like them. Nevertheless, they made a mistake years ago and that tab is coming due.
What advice would you give to budding Native American writers?
I would say don't write for the critics; it's too easy. Don't write for the classroom necessarily. It's great if your stuff finds the classroom, but if you let the critics and the professors be the gatekeepers, then they're only going to validate and ratify stuff that fits a mold they already have. If you want to be doing new stuff, you've got to ignore all of that. You've got to jump that gate and go directly to the market.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
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McMurty, Alice. "PW TALKS WITH STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: Haunted Hunters." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 7, 17 Feb. 2020, p. 182. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A615711403/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=927eb1d5. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Jones, Stephen Graham THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS Saga/Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $26.99 4, 7 ISBN: 978-1-9821-3645-1
A violent tale of vengeance, justice, and generational trauma from a prolific horror tinkerer.
Jones (Mapping the Interior, 2017, etc.) delivers a thought-provoking trip to the edge of your seat in this rural creature feature. Four young Blackfeet men ignore the hunting boundaries of their community and fire into an elk herd on land reserved for the elders, but one elk proves unnaturally hard to kill. Years later, they’re forced to answer for their act of selfish violence, setting into motion a supernatural hunt in which predator becomes prey. The plot meanders ever forward, stopping and starting as it vies for primacy with the characters. As Jones makes his bloody way through the character rotation, he indulges in reflections on rural life, community expectations, and family, among other things, but never gets lost in the weeds. From the beer bottles decorating fences to free-throw practice on the old concrete pad in the cold, the Rez and its silent beauty establishes itself as an important character in the story, and one that each of the other characters must reckon with before the end. Horror’s genre conventions are more than satisfied, often in ways that surprise or subvert expectations; fans will grin when they come across clever nods and homages sprinkled throughout that never feel heavy-handed or too cute. While the minimalist prose propels the narrative, it also serves to establish an eerie tone of detachment that mirrors the characters’ own questions about what it means to live distinctly Native lives in today's world—a world that obscures the line between what is traditional and what is contemporary. Form and content strike a delicate balance in this work, allowing Jones to revel in his distinctive voice, which has always lingered, quiet and disturbing, in the stark backcountry of the Rez.
Jones hits his stride with a smart story of social commentary—it’s scary good.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Jones, Stephen Graham: THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A617192973/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=67764ceb. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
The Only Good Indians
By Stephen Graham Jones
Horror
Stephen Graham Jones pulls off an interesting feat in his new novel, The Only Good Indians (Saga, $26.99, 9781982136451). He makes you question whether you should root for the four Native American friends who shot and killed a family of elk on a hunting trip or for the spirit of the elk as it seeks revenge against them.
Ten years ago, while hunting on land designated for use by their tribal elders, Ricky, Lewis, Gabe and Cass opened fire on a small elk herd with reckless abandon, killing far more than they should have, including one that was pregnant. The now 30-something men have moved off of the Blackfeet reservation, but the incident still haunts Lewis, who has always felt guilty about the deed as well as about having turned his back on his culture.
When Lewis sees a vision of the elk's calf in his living room, his guilt begins to consume him. He suspects the elk's spirit has taken the form of a friend, Shaney, and he sets a grisly trap for her. But Lewis' irrational fears continue, and before long, he suspects the entity has switched forms again, this time taking on that of his wife, Peta. Confused by Lewis' actions at first, Gabe and Cass soon begin to experience the wrath of the elk's spirit as well, leading up to a frantic finale.
Borrowing a bit from his previous novel, Mongrels, which explored the mindset of a family of werewolves, Jones' latest novel dips into the elk's perspective in several chapters. As a result, the reader is torn as to which faction--men or beast--is more deserving of empathy. The Only Good Indians unfolds at a slow and steady pace that offers ample opportunities for sharp commentary on history, past choices and the identity crises of a group of Native American men. It toys with impending doom, then slaps you in the face with violence.
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Frazier, G. Robert. "The Only Good Indians." BookPage, July 2020, pp. 20+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A627291342/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61347a51. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
The Only Good Indians
Stephen Graham Jones Saga Press 320p $26.99
They thought they were lucky.
The antiheroes of Stephen Graham Jones's revenge-horror novel, The Only Good Indians, are four Blackfeet men, childhood friends, who on the Saturday before Thanksgiving go poaching in the part of the forest set aside for tribal elders. They dub the trip the "Thanksgiving Classic," and they are in the woods for fun, for friendship--but also out of economic need and shame. Winter is coming, and they haven't managed to fill their freezers with big game. So they roll through the woods in the kind of broken-down truck Keith Secola would sing about. At the bottom of a cliff they spot the elk, spread out like a carpet of easy prey--and so begins a hunt that spans a decade and threatens not only their own lives, but the next generation.
Jones is the winner of multiple horror and fantasy awards, and his most recent novel has earned praise from Stephen King. He's a King-like writer: punchy, down-to-earth, fond of closing out his chapters with sinister one-liners:
The ceiling of the living room.
That spotlight.
It's flickering yellow.
He finds horror in everyday objects and moments, the spinning blades of a ceiling fan or the marginalia scribbled in a paperback novel.
The Only Good Indians is a scary and well-told tale of four men being stalked by the spirit of an elk they had killed, returned from the dead as the shapeshifting Elk Head Woman. But it is also an exploration of guilt--how we respond to the slow, suppressed knowledge that we have done something truly wrong. And it is a portrayal of everyday Indian life. The characters are mostly married men who long for their bachelor days of good times and bad decisions. There is a sweat lodge and the cadences of traditional storytelling; there is the small town entanglement in which everybody is somebody's son. And there is ever-present and deadly racism.
Jones writes terrific descriptions of basketball games on the reservation--even the sports-ignorant will be enthralled by the scenes of the basketball prodigy Denorah, daughter of one of the hunters, as Jones makes you feel the "spinning-away leather" under Denorah's fingertips, the hula swivel of her hips, the discipline and the twisting muscles and the fury. These scenes show Denorah's hope, her youthful certainty that talent and hard work will triumph, her ferocity and her willingness to listen when somebody has something worth saying. But they also show the world that does not respect her. At her games rival fans chant, "Indians, go home!"
In many horror tales, the threatened protagonists call the police. They cannot help, because if they could help, it wouldn't be horror, but they try. In The Only Good Indians, the scene in which the cops show up may be the book's tensest moment. Investigating a dog bite, the cops come to see Lewis, one of the participants in the "Thanksgiving Classic." We know Lewis as a nerdy married guy who has been having some disturbing visions lately. They see him as a brown criminal. They treat him with casual disdain: "Shouldn't you be at work?" They know they can kill him. With one wrong gesture he can fill them with fear--and they can fill him with bullets. Lewis knows they are as much a threat to him as Elk Head Woman herself.
The title alone should make it clear that The Only Good Indians is about whether--or how--American Indians can survive in a white world. When one hunter describes a sweat lodge as "the safest place in the Indian world," a younger man scoffs, "That means we're only eighty percent probably going to die here, not ninety percent?" These are people who, when somebody mentions "your friend who...got shot," have to ask, "Which one?" This is a world where a jagged, clumsy scar might be the sign of supernatural resurrection--or it might just mean that Indian women don't always get the best doctors.
The book is divided into four sections, one per friend, three titled with Native riffs on horror--for example, "It Came From the Rez." The Indians are hunters in this novel, but also prey; so far, so obvious. But "Blackfeet are to elk as white people are to Blackfeet" is an equation for the SAT. Jones is doing something subtler.
Lewis's wife is white, which suggests one layer of complexity. The novel hints at a better way of coexistence: a way to live in the natural world without being its enemy, for example. Even the narration suggests the hope of mutual understanding, as one section is told from the elk's-eye view, the creatures who "move like blown smoke across the rolling prairie." The Only Good Indians knows that this better way was lost long before the four friends decided to poach from the elders. Whether the better way was lost long before the white men came (say, on the day the man and woman left the Garden dressed in the skins of the dead creatures they had named), this novel doesn't say. What it does concern is the nature of repentance necessary to restore the better way.
The four men's guilt may seem disproportionate to the offense. There are more elk in the woods, right? Is it so bad to kill too many? But Jones shows us two nonhuman lives as microcosms: the created universe in the form of a pregnant elk. This is a classic horror trope, the seemingly small wrongdoing that spirals out into terrible consequences because it reflects a deeper disorder in the soul. (Is it so bad to eat an apple?) When the universe itself has been violated, what can put it right?
And here the novel's emotional honesty meets its moral and even mystical tendencies. Horror is a good genre for exploring the hunger for justice, because justice requires a supernatural intervention--no mere human can fully repair the harm we do. All the Blackfeet characters here are people you will love, and although for a long time they remain "unprepared to face what [they'd] done," it won't surprise you that eventually they try to make things right.
They try generosity; it isn't enough. They try violence. It fails--but not before several gut-wrenching scenes of gore and the destruction of love. They try returning to the old ways, pushing the guilt out through their pores in a sweat lodge. "All you ever want this deep into a sweat, it's a bit of reprieve," Jones writes. "But you've got to push through that." But even the old ways do not restore the balance.
One person caught in the elk's revenge tries to fix things by suffering, that razor edge where martyrdom becomes suicide. But neither guilt nor determination nor tradition are enough. At last an innocent willingly enters the unforgiving mathematics of justice. In this final sequence, Jones moves easily between legend and everyday life. He creates, from characters you might meet on any ordinary day, an extraordinary portrait of sacrifice and costly reconciliation.
By Eve Tushnet
Eve Tushnet is the author of Punishment: A Love Story.
Caption: The Only Good Indians is a scary and well-told tale of four men being stalked by the spirit of an elk.
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Tushnet, Eve. "The fight for survival in a white world." America, vol. 223, no. 6, Nov. 2020, pp. 62+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A653837945/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=39da34fa. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Night of the Mannequins
Stephen Graham Jones.Tor.com, $11.99 trade paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-250-75206-2
Jones (The Only Good Indians) tiptoes the border between supernatural and psychological horror in this weird and wild novella. Sawyer Grimes is one of five bored teens who decide to pose a discarded store mannequin as though it's a real patron in a movie theater in a suburb of Dallas. They all think it's a funny prank--until Sawyer sees the mannequin walk out of the theater at the movie's end. When one of the friends is killed, along with her entire family, in a freak accident shortly thereafter, Sawyer becomes convinced that the mannequin's to blame. Believing "Manny" has morphed into a Frankenstein-style monster bent on offing its creators with no regard for who else gets hurt in the process, Sawyer decides that it's his responsibility to kill his fellow pranksters before Manny can get to them, and thus lessen the collateral damage for their families. Jones expertly expresses Sawyer's teenage attitudes and anxieties while skillfully tipping readers off to the chilling understanding that Sawyer is not the most reliable of narrators. Balancing horror and humor, this novella puts a clever modern twist on a classic monster story. Agent: BJ Robbins, BJ Robbins Literary. (July)
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"Night of the Mannequins." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 15, 13 Apr. 2020, pp. 43+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A624519109/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0e06b1d6. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Night of the Mannequins. By Stephen Graham Jones. Sept. 2020. 128p. paper, $13.99 (9781250752079); Tor, e-book, $3.99 (9781250752062).
When Shanna gets a job at the local movie theater, her group of close friends starts to sneak into movies without paying and to play pranks on Shanna and her boss. When they were kids, they found a mannequin, and they use it to set up an elaborate trick in the theater--but as moviegoers leave the theater, so does the mannequin. Sawyer, an outlier in the group, is convinced that Manny the mannequin is alive, a theory fueled by the fact that something is stealing the neighborhood's fertilizer. After Shanna and her family are killed in a freak accident, Sawyer is convinced that Manny is out to kill all of his friends, and that he is the only one who can save them. Jones' latest (after The Only Good Indians, 2020) is a fever dream of a horror novella, where the reader is never quite sure what is happening or whom to trust. It is suspenseful from beginning to end as Sawyer narrates the story in an approachable and engaging way, luring the reader in even as Manny comes out of the shadows.--Emily Whitmore
YA: Teen fans of horror will enjoy this compelling story about the lengths we go for our friends. EW.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Whitmore, Emily. "Night of the Mannequins." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 22, 1 Aug. 2020, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A633841924/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f0be4165. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw. By Stephen Graham Jones. Aug. 2021. 416p. Saga, $26.99 (9781982137632).
Following the success of The Only Good Indians (2020), Jones returns with a love letter to the slasher film. Jade, half-Indian, poor, and motherless, finds her only solace in the slasher movies of the 1980s and the extra-credit essays she writes for her history teacher explaining the genre's themes. A group of rich investors "discovers" beautiful and secluded Proofrock, Idaho, despite its troubling history of mass murders and lake witches. Issues of class and privilege collide with the threat of a Fourth of July massacre, though no one takes Jade's warnings seriously. She pins all hope for survival on the new girl--the rich and beautiful Letha, the perfect "final girl." Readers will be drawn in by the effordess storytelling and Jade's unique cadence. In this methodically paced story, every detail both entertains and matters, and the expertly rendered setting explodes with violent action. This brilliantly crafted, heartbreakingly beautiful slasher presents a new type of authentic "final girl," one that isn't "pure" and may not be totally innocent, yet can still be a vessel for hope. Pair this with thought-provoking, trauma-themed horror such as Paul Tremblays A Head Full of Ghosts (2015) or Victor La Valle's The Changeling (2017).--Becky Spratford
YA: Jade is an engaging, honest, and vulnerable teen narrator struggling with very real demons. BS.
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Spratford, Becky. "My Heart Is a Chainsaw." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 19-20, 1 June 2021, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666230207/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=407da420. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw. By Stephen Graham Jones. Read by Cara Gee. 2021. 9.5hr. Simon & Schuster Audio, DD, $19.99 (9781797123325).
Outcast teenager and Blackfeet Jade Daniels is Proofrock, Idaho's "horror girl." She talks in slasher-film language and spends lots of time thinking about her survival for the inevitable battle to come. An extravagant new housing development brings Letha Mondragon to town, a fellow high school senior who ticks all of the boxes for a final girl. Events point to evil on the horizon, and Jade needs to prepare Letha to accept her role, even though no one believes Jade's warnings. First Nations actor Cara Gee narrates with an appropriate level of indifference, which fits Jade's wearied perspective. Gee gives main characters well-suited and distinct voices: Letha's is soft and gentle, Sheriff Hardy s is rough and twangy. When Jade speaks about her beloved slashers, Gee adds animation to her voice, demonstrating Jade's devotion to the genre. While the novel isn't gory throughout, some parts are quite gruesome and vividly detailed, and Gee keeps her tone and energy fairly even, though not dispassionate. This book will appeal to thriller readers, except the faint of heart, and horror lovers will want to keep a notepad handy to jot down all of the movie references. Those who aren't in it for the horror will appreciate Jade's tenacity and complexity. --Suzanne Temple
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Temple, Suzanne. "My Heart Is a Chainsaw." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2021, pp. 77+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A695507242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9c576715. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
*Jones, Stephen Graham. My Heart Is a Chainsaw. S. & S. Audio. Sept. 2021.12.25 hrs. ISBN 9781797123325. $23.99. HORROR
Seventeen-year-old Jade Daniels is something of a pariah in her small town. A member of the Blackfoot tribe, she is obsessed with slasher movies, has an abusive father, and is just counting the days until a real horror event happens in her tiny town of Proofrock, Idaho. After the mysterious deaths of two tourists Jade is convinced that all the signs point to a slasher event, and she fruitlessly tries to warn the town. She identifies all the typical slasher players, especially the Final Girl, whose virtue gives her the strength to defeat the monster. Jade has few allies, but her history teacher, to whom she writes papers explaining all aspects of slasher lore and how it relates to the sinister events occurring in Proofrock, is one of them. These papers are interspersed among the chapters explaining the increasingly mysterious and terrifying deaths occurring in Proofrock. Class, race, and education all play a role in the story, and one need not be familiar with the slasher film genre to understand Jade's references. The tension builds to a horrifying climax with all the gore Jade could ever have hoped for and ends on an uncertain, supernatural note. Cara Gee narrates the book with extreme skill. She gives perfect voice to Jade, evincing her cynicism, anger, and deep hurt, but also her hope, kindness, conviction, and bravery. The building tension is perfectly paced; listeners will journey with Jade through redemption and freeing acknowledgment of what really happened to her in the past to bring her where she is today. VERDICT This is a musthave for public library collections.--B. Allison Gray, Goleta Valley Lib., CA
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"My Heart Is a Chainsaw." Library Journal, vol. 146, no. 12, Dec. 2021, pp. 54+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686559304/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=01a4b6c4. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
JONES, Stephen Graham. My Heart Is a Chainsaw. 416p. S. & S./Saga. Aug. 2021. Tr $26.99. ISBN 9781982137632.
Jade Daniels is an outcast in the quickly gentrifying Idaho lake town she's always called home. When a Dutch teenager is found dead, Jade takes morbid delight in the fact that this is surely the first victim in a horror film come to life. Everyone in town is a suspect, and beautiful new classmate Letha Mondragon is the perfect Final Girl--the genre's famous lone survivor. If Jade's obsession with slasher movies is the center of this novel, issues of class, power, and addiction are the spokes that connect the wheel. Content warnings include sexual abuse and suicide, as the protagonist lives in poverty with an abusive father and attempts to take her own life. Jade's family belongs to the Blackfeet tribe, and Jones (Blackfeet) authentically conveys feeling unwelcome in one's own home. Tropes from horror movies play a big role in the novel. The omniscient narration tracks Jade's obsession with these films, a hyper focus that frustrates the few reliable adults in her life as she struggles to communicate in any way other than through the lens of slasher movies. Readers can't help but root for her and implore other characters to heed her warnings, especially in the last third of the book, when the pace sharply quickens. VERDICT A horror novel not dissimilar to slasher movies. Recommended for mature teens.--Lindsay Jensen, Nashville Public Lib.
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Jensen, Lindsay. "JONES, Stephen Graham. My Heart Is a Chainsaw." School Library Journal, vol. 67, no. 12, Dec. 2021, p. 101. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686052342/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ec9aff06. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Don't Fear the Reaper
Stephen Graham Jones. Saga, $27.99 (464p) ISBN 978-1-982186-59-3
Jade Daniels and her encyclopedic knowledge of slasher films return for another blood-soaked romp in Jones's superb sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw. It's been four years since Jade--now going by Jennifer--survived the Independence Day Massacre that devastated her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho. Jennifer is trying ro put her traumatic past behind her when Dark Mill South, a legendary hook-handed serial killer,-escapes captivity on the outskirts of Proofrock during a once-in-a-century winter storm. When gruesomely gutted bodies pile up around town, Jennifer's reflexes and genre savvy kick in and she must once again rally her friends and the local authorities, while using her familiarity with cinematic slaughter to save them all from victimhood. The only problem, as she deduces from the killer's unsroppable onslaught, is that "he knows all the same movies we do." Jones expertly blends snappy graveyard humor with nail-biting suspense, and he gives his characters distinctive personalities that distinguish them from the underdeveloped body fodder common to most slasher scenarios. This characteristically clever gore-fest proves Jennifer to be a horror heroine worthy of many more adventures. Agent: B.J. Robbins, BJ Robbins Literary. (Feb.)
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Robbins, B.J. "Don't Fear the Reaper." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 44, 24 Oct. 2022, p. 61. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A726744372/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4b26d5c5. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Don't Fear the Reaper. By Stephen Graham Jones. Feb. 2023.464p. Saga, $27.99 (9781982186593); e-book, $14.99 (9781982186616).
December 12, 2019, four years after the massacre at Indian Lake, Jade Daniels returns in the midst of a blizzard just as serial killer Dark Mills South murders his armed transport team and escapes. For the next 36 hours, the town of Proofrock, Idaho, will be forced to relive its trauma as killers out for revenge go on a bloody rampage. Armed with her slasher-movie knowledge, indefatigable spirit, and strong moral center, Jade will need to embrace her final-girl status if there is any hope of making it to Friday the thirteenth. Building off My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021), Jones gets right into the terrifyingly gory action, a pace that only sporadically allows for gulps of air. A multitude of voices get a chance to be heard and ultimately set the stage for Jade's return. More than the slasher it presents itself as, this is a contemplation of the allure of the genre itself, a novel that acknowledges the well-trod ground upon which it stands while ingeniously burrowing new tunnels straight into readers' nightmares. A superior example of twenty-first-century horror with a strong, emotionally heartfelt core where every detail matters, delivered by an author at the top of his game. --Becky Spratford
YA: Multiple points of view center around the towns high-school seniors, and the ties to well-known slasher films will appeal to teen horror fanatics. BS.
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Spratford, Becky. "Don't Fear the Reaper." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 7-8, 1 Dec. 2022, p. 114. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731042696/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c7e1770e. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Stephen Graham Jones is the bestselling author of nearly 30 novels and collections, as well as novellas and comic books. The most recent is My Heart is a Chainsaw. Up next are Earthdivers and Don't Fear the Reaper. Jones lives and teaches in Boulder, CO. He talks with LJ about his newest book, the genre as a whole, and his influences.
You've won numerous awards and been on best seller lists, but you are, by no means, an overnight success. What has this experience over the last few years been like for you as a writer and a human?
The questions I get asked in interviews aren't so much "Why do you like horror?" or "What's with all the blood and guts?"--all these are really just trying to kindly phrase the real question: Why are you so weird?-but something more like "How does horror engage the world of today?" That question gets asked in all kinds of creative ways, but it usually boils down to that. And that's great, of course, simply because it's not "How can horror engage the world?" Asking it like that would mean that horror's not currently doing that. But we all know it is, and that it has been, and that it'll keep doing that. So, I like that horror's not having to jump that initial hurdle so much, anymore. That we're more dealt-in than we might have been before. Just, what we have to be wary of now is respectability, right? Respectability's the worst. Best to be the gadfly, transgressing, challenging, poking and prodding, and leaving bloody footprints in the hallway, for readers to wake up to.
Why are your books and horror in general gaining so much mainstream attention right now? What about this genre do today's reader's find so appealing?
There's so much impossible stuff happening in the world today that the genres that inhere the fantastic maybe seem a little less distant? A little less impossible? As in, the ecosphere seems to be in slow, and not so slow, collapse. The pandemic is trying to become endemic. World leaders are comporting themselves in monstrous ways. Public spaces, and the people in them, are getting shot up. None of this is easy to make sense of. But? What horror can provide are similarly scary experiences with distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. So, to a world that feels perpetually stuck in the middle of the horror, the idea that there's an end down there somewhere--just a speck of daylight at the end of this long, dark tunnelwell, that can kind of be consoling, can't it? Horror can provide that. Just, there's a price, too: your sleep. But better to worry about monsters scratching their claws on your window than important people with their fingers on dangerous buttons.
Don't Fear the Reaper is book two in what will be a trilogy. What made you want to return to Jade and Proofrock, ID, having only written stand-alones up to this point?
Yeah, it's a lot different, writing a trilogy. This is my first time to try it. And, since I'm a seat-of-the-pants writer, I had no real idea what was going to happen in Don't Fear the Reaper until it was happening on my screen. Same with the third book, which I'm due to write this summer. Hopefully I come up with a title. But, luckily, I've already got the placeIndian Lake, Proofrock, Terra Nova--and I've already got Jade Daniels, so I bet it'll work out. As for why do a trilogy instead a stand-alone, though, I wonder if it's just that I kind of accidentally world-built this place such that the world wasn't all used up at the end of the first book? There was more story there, just under the water, just across the lake. And I'd feel kind of bad if I didn't write it down.
I am beginning to see younger writers list you as their influence. What does that mean to you?
What it means, I guess, is responsibility. As in, I have to try to set a good example, be some sort of role model. But, luckily, I've had a lot of great role models setting those good examples already. Joe R. Lansdale's at the very top of that list. You won't find someone more committed to quality on the page, someone more a student of the form--in his case, forms--and I dare you to find someone with better principles and character than him. Like, a few years ago, I was giving him a ride to his event at Tattered Cover up here in Denver. We're at this big intersection deep in the heart of five o'clock, stopped right at the front line at a red light, acres of impatient cars stacked up behind us, and this homeless guy's walking his bicycle through the crosswalk when his knee collapses, and he goes down in front of all this traffic about to launch. Before I could even process what was happening, really, Joe was out of the car, running out into the intersection, and helping this guy the rest of the way across. And? I think a lot of horror writers are like that, really. I mean, maybe because Joe's been around so long, showing us how to be better, being generous with his time, but I just find horror people to generally be compassionate. Which isn't to badtalk writers or fans of any of the other genres. Just, I know horror the best, and horror people. And, finally? Most horror, whatever the subgenre, is finally about resisting bullies, be those bullies aliens, mole men, vampires, goalies, whatever. But engaging so many stories about bullies, I kind of suspect that leaves horror people really tuned in to bullying, in a way that not only can push back against it, but that maybe can even keep it from happening in the first place. So, yeah, what I'm saying is we need to vote a horror fan into the highest office. It could only do the world good.
From your perch on top of the genre today, and also, as an English professor, what are your hopes for horror going into the future?
People keep saying horror's booming now, that we're achieving the kind of cultural saturation that we had back in various heydays. And they're not wrong. But what I hope is that we can somehow avoid that thing that happens when any group or movement or genre gets popular, where we start believing our own hype, and thinking we can do no wrong. I also want horror to continue to innovate, to take chances, to tell stories that aren't sure things, but that might, if we do them juuuust right, actually work. The other thing I want for horror is for it--for us--to keep finding new and diverse voices. Exclusivity always leaves someone out in the cold, and leaving people in the cold, that's not horror's way. We know what's out there in the darkness, I mean. We can hear the teeth, see the eyeshine. I want us, instead of locking people out, to leave the gates wide open, and then probably just knock the walls down as well, in case anybody can't find that gate. Then all that's left is to leave a light on in the window, and have a bowl of something hot waiting. I mean, sure, let's not tell everybody exactly what meat that is in this stew, but, on a cold night, with friends, does it really even matter?--Becky Spratford
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"STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES." Library Journal, vol. 147, no. 7, July 2022, pp. 16+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A708805556/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2ee36b6e. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Jones, Stephen Graham MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW Saga/Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $17.29 8, 31 ISBN: 978-1-9821-3763-2
A Catcher in the Rye meets Friday the 13th in the latest slasher novel from thriller aficionado Jones.
Jade Daniels is the local weird girl in her small town of Proofrock, Idaho. After a suicide attempt cements her status as a pariah, Jade retreats into her encyclopedic knowledge of the slasher genre as a way to make sense of her troubled world. Jones presents a deep character study that explores all the typical terrain of both an angst-y teen coming-of-age story and a campy slasher film, but with a protagonist so invested in her slasher world that it takes on a fresh presentation, not to mention a fair bit of humor. Rather than doing two things poorly, Jones is able to leverage the strengths of each genre to complement the other. Jade's capacity to examine her own trauma, heartache, and desire to belong is repeatedly fashioned through the slasher lens with surprisingly satisfying results. When local events begin to more and more resemble the conventions of her particular obsession, Jade finds herself in a unique position to witness the story unfold in real time. Despite the inclusion of some coming-of-age story stereotypes, like the absent mother and deadbeat father, Jade's earnestness grounds the novel with a clear protagonist and stakes. Jones' invocation and subversion of slasher tropes and traditions are delivered masterfully in this love letter to the genre, where newcomer and entrenched fan alike will feel rewarded. In no small way, Jones demonstrates the heights to which the slasher genre can aspire.
A magnum opus that has the power to send readers scrambling for more.
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"Jones, Stephen Graham: MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW." Kirkus Reviews, 23 Feb. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A738705505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5f402743. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
The Angel of Indian Lake
Stephen Graham Jones. Simon and Schuster, $28.99 (464p) ISBN 978-1-66801-166-9
Jones (Don't Fear the Reaper) brings his Jade Daniels trilogy to a bloody end in this riotously entertaining tale. It's 2023, eight years after 17-year-old slasher movie aficionado Jade was both unable to save her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, from the gruesome events now remembered as the Independence Day Massacre and unjustly imprisoned as the perpetrator of the bloodbath. Older and wiser, Jade's working as a history teacher at her old high school in Proofrock when things start going to hell in a handbasket again: more local teenagers turn up slaughtered, a raging fire consumes the forest surrounding town, and a spectral figure dubbed "the Angel" haunts the shores of the lake that town fathers dammed up to submerge the original settlement on which Proofrock was founded. Jones weaves in plenty of clues and red herrings to keep the reader guessing just who is responsible for all the mayhem before igniting a climax that plays out like a horror film library exploding its holdings in a fiery spectacular. At the center of it all is Jade, a descendant of the Indigenous tribes displaced by Proofrock's settlers who embraces her outsider status and plays the perfect guide through this tale's weird terrain. This is a worthy finale to a series that has expanded the horizons of contemporary horror. Agent: BJ Robbins, BJ Robbins Literary. (Mar.)
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"The Angel of Indian Lake." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 4, 29 Jan. 2024, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A782610492/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bb3bb3b0. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Jones, Stephen Graham THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE Saga/Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $28.99 3, 26 ISBN: 9781668011669
The ultimate final girl reaches the bloody end of her frayed, traumatized rope.
How readers absorb this last volume of Jones' hyperviolent, gory ode to horror flicks probably depends largely on their appetite for the genre itself. What's on offer here is a lot, not only in terms of blood 'n' guts but also a fat stack of backstory and a dizzying cast. Jade Daniels, the reluctant but relentless heroine of the trilogy, has returned to Proofrock, Idaho, after her second prison stint for the events chronicled in My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021) and Don't Fear the Reaper (2022). Her wealthy best friend, Letha Mondragon-Tompkins, has gotten her a job teaching high school history, but all the meds and therapy available aren't really cutting it. Before long, tiny threads--a real estate project at the site of the previous massacre at "Camp Blood," a pair of missing teenagers, and a raging forest fire started by a grieving game warden--have exploded into an infernal nightmare. The writing is still boxing-match ferocious and precise, but while every word is carefully chosen, they're not all in service of explaining what's really happening. The plotlines are often steeped in urban legend, which are gleefully punctuated by Jade's rat-a-tat-tat horror movie references à la Ready Player One. That's catnip for horror fans, and the images Jones conjures would give some of the movies a run for their money. Whether it's Jade's rapist father back from the dead, a murderous child mutilating the townsfolk, a pack of rampaging bears tearing through the flames, or the titular ghost making the rounds at the local lake, it's real peek-between-your-fingers stuff--when you can work out what exactly happened.
A characteristically violent denouement for a girl given hell by just about everybody.
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"Jones, Stephen Graham: THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786185771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=00667f8e. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Jones, Stephen Graham. The Angel of Indian Lake. S. & S. Audio. (Indian Lake Trilogy, Bk. 3). Mar. 2024.16:30 hrs. ISBN 9781797170800. $29.99. horror
The final, pulse-pounding chapter in Jones's "Indian Lake" trilogy picks up in October 2023, four years after the events of Don't Fear the Reaper. After being released from prison, Jade Daniels, a devotee of the slasher genre, returns to her hometown of Proofrock, ID. Much like Jade, the townspeople are trying to heal from the events of the last book, but the horrors beneath the lake's surface are rising from the depths, and Jade must make her final stand to stop the evil once and for all. Jones's story uses his encyclopedic knowledge of the slasher movie by dropping several bloody Easter eggs while digging deep Into the effects of generational trauma most slashers avoid. Battle-tested through the last two books, Jade emerges as a woman who is brave but fearful and broken, although not yet shattered. A full cast of brilliant narrators portrays characters that listeners will perceive as real, making the wounds these characters receive, especially the fatal ones, cut deep. VERDICT If this book and the trilogy are Jones's love letter to the slasher genre, it could just as easily make other readers fall in love with it too.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Gardner, James. "Jones, Stephen Graham. The Angel of Indian Lake." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 6, June 2024, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797499029/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=44621a03. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
* The Angel of Indian Lake. By Stephen Graham Jones. Read by a full cast. 2024. 16.5hr. Simon & Schuster Audio, DD (9781797170800).
Slasher movie devotee Jade Daniels, recently released from prison, has returned to ProofTock, Idaho. With the help of "final girl" and best friend Letha, Jade has become the new high school history teacher, following in the footsteps of the beloved Mr. Holmes. When some of her students go missing, a parent is found headless picking up his kid from school, and a wildfire spreads through the forest, Jade-self-proclaimed Cassandra--feels certain that the curse of the Lake Witch is rearing its head yet again. Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota actor Isabella Star LaBlanc leads the audiobook cast perfectly as Jade, who carries abundant trauma. LaBlanc knows just how and when to show this, with subtle changes to pacing and tone when the time warrants. Despite the nonstop action, LaBlanc's narration is deliberate and understated, fitting a character who has experienced frequent terror (and definitely encounters it in this title). Cult horror fans will delight in Barbara Crampton's narration, and listeners will eagerly anticipate Stephen King's cameo. Stephen Graham Jones himself reads the final chapter with tenderness, leaving listeners longing to experience the entire trilogy again. As Angel of Indian Lake features intricate plotting and many references to earlier events and characters in the trilogy, readers should listen to My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021) before beginning this one.--Suzanne Temple
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Temple, Suzanne. "The Angel of Indian Lake." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 19-20, 1 June 2024, p. 102. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804018402/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d118c961. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
I Was a Teenage Slasher. By Stephen Graham Jones. July 2024. 384p. Saga, $27.99 (9781668022245).
Hot on the heels of his Indian Lake Trilogy (beginning with My Heart Is a Chainsaw, 2021), which introduced the twenty-first century's final girl, Jade Daniels, Jones is back with Tolly Driver, the yin to Jade's yang. Narrating from 17 years in the future, Tolly recounts, in an engaging and brutally honest voice, the summer of 1989 in Lamesa, Texas, when he was 17, when he killed 6 (or 12 or 14) of his high-school classmates. Beginning with the fateful night he and his best friend, Amber, attend a house party and leading readers through Tolly's transformation from skinny kid with a peanut allergy to inevitable killer, this novel lays down new ground rules for the Slasher, deeply rooted in its established tropes while moving it in a new direction, but still making novices feel welcome. 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, but especially those who recently enjoyed Paul Tremblay's The Pallbearers Club (2022) and Monika Kim's The Eyes Are the Best Part (2024) or have missed Jeff Lindsay's seminal sympathetic killer, Dexter. --Becky Spratford
YA: Jones' novel will not only appeal to teen slasher-movie fans but will also reward their deep knowledge of the genre with a fresh take on one of their favorite types of stories. BS.
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Spratford, Becky. "I Was a Teenage Slasher." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 18, 18 May 2024, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804017439/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3f00fc97. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Jones, Stephen Graham. I Was a Teenage Slasher. S. & S./Saga. Jul. 2024. 384p. ISBN 9781668022245. $27.99. HORROR
Tolly Driver is 17, lives in Lamesa, TX, and is a slasher who has committed multiple murders. Awkward and already an outsider, Tolly faced challenges, including bullies and the death of his father, before transforming into the titular killer. This novel in the style of an autobiography pays homage to the slasher flicks of the 1980s and '90s while creating something entirely new. Fans of Bram Stoker Award winner Jones's other books about growing up in West Texas (like Not for Nothing) will find the same rich detail and sense of place. Grimly humorous and filled with surprising turns, this novel is poised to become a summer-reading hit and a book club favorite. VERDICT Even those well versed in slashers and their tropes will be surprised by the directions Jones takes. Readable both as representative of slasher films and book and as an exploration of the rules of the genre, this novel will have wide appeal to readers who are new to Jones's work as well as established fans. Recommended as a contrast for fans of recent "final girl" books like the ones by Grady Hendrix and Riley Sager and readers who enjoyed The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay.--Lila Denning
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Denning, Lila. "Jones, Stephen Graham. I Was a Teenage Slasher." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 7, July 2024, p. 91. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A800536138/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fc0ef213. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
I Was a Teenage Slasher
Stephen Graham Jones. Simon & Schuster, $29.99 (384p) ISBN 978-1-66802-224-5
Bestseller Jones (the Indian Lake trilogy) again riffs on 1980s slasher movies in this indulgent bloodbath. Tolly Driver witnesses a massacre at a high school party at the hands of Justin Jones, an undead classmate who died during a vicious prank gone awry. Having gotten infected with a couple drops of Justin's blood, and reeling from a near-death experience stemming from his peanut allergy, Tolly finds himself driven by the urge to go on a murder spree of his own. He dons a mask and slashes his way through his small Texas town. Only his childhood friend, final girl Amber Dennison, serves as a tether to the scared and fragile kid he was before the killing began. Will she be able to stop the slaughter once and for all? 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. Unfortunately, chaotic plotting undercuts the story's tension and narrator Tolly's many tangents make the pacing somewhat start-and-stop. Even so, fans of meta horror will find a lot to love as Jones remixes well-worn tropes with glee. Agent: BJ Robbins, BJ Robbins Literary. (July)
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"I Was a Teenage Slasher." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 20, 20 May 2024, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799270655/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1218a099. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
n Stephen Graham Jones's new novel, a young outcast is forced to become a murderer fated to enact gory revenge.
I WAS A TEENAGE SLASHER, by Stephen Graham Jones
Literature has been a thriving hunting ground for the serial killer. If the 20th century brought about the emergence of the maniac repeat murderer as ''a new kind of person ... one of the superstars of our wound culture,'' as the critic Mark Seltzer posits in his 1998 cultural study ''Serial Killers,'' then ambitious fiction writers were sure to examine this new human species under their microscope.
The apogee of serial-killer fiction arguably arrived in the 1990s, with the psychopath as first-person narrator in the radical nihilism of Dennis Cooper's ''Frisk,'' Bret Easton Ellis's ''American Psycho'' and Joyce Carol Oates's ''Zombie.'' But even the serial killer isn't immune to trends. In keeping with our current century's predilection for turning monsters and boogeymen into misunderstood outcasts, Stephen Graham Jones's viciously clever, over-the-top, genre-skewing new novel turns a gruesome murderer into ''your friendly neighborhood slasher.''
The plot of ''I Was a Teenage Slasher'' is straight out of the horror section of the video store. It's the summer of 1989, in small-town Lamesa, Texas. Our protagonist is Tolly Driver, an awkward 17-year-old. He and his best friend, Amber, decide to crash a party thrown by the cool kids -- the same cool kids who, a few years back, caused the death of another student by forcing him to ride a pump jack, resulting in his accidental dismemberment. When this dead student reappears as a zombie at the party to enact gory revenge, some of his monster blood splatters into a cut on Tolly's forehead.
The rest makes sense only if you're willing to go along for the joyride. Infected, our narrator morphs into an unstoppable, superhuman killing machine, seeking out members of the school marching band who played a near-fatal trick on him. Tolly has no control over his new bloodlust, stalking and killing by night in a mask fashioned from his mother's belts. As he proclaims, ''I was the scary thing in the dark.''
Jones is no horror novice: He's been publishing steadily for over two decades. Yet it was the success of his 2020 novel ''The Only Good Indians,'' which blends the struggles of contemporary Native American life with a supernatural elk story, that brought him a deservedly wider audience. ''I Was a Teenage Slasher'' is less concerned with vanishing cultural memory -- unless that shared memory is of being a lonely American teenager with a love of 1980s slasher films.
Much of the story is understandably preposterous, and Jones is clearly having a fun time playing with horror-genre tropes. A few scenes lean too heavily on comic book conventions, and the problem with parody is that it often suffers the same tedium of the formulaic devices it sets out to critique. What saves the novel, what makes us not only follow Tolly but care about him as he bashes one teenager's head into a camper and impales another with a twirling baton, is his spectacularly engaging narrative voice, which is imbued with a street-smart lyricism that makes even the loftiest observations glitter like knife blades. ''You'd think that, dragging bodies behind you, at some point you wouldn't be able to keep moving, wouldn't you?'' our protagonist muses. ''Not so. They're all there, they never go away, but they're tin cans, they don't weigh anything. Just make a lot of noise.''
The story is narrated by a middle-aged Tolly looking back from the present day, a vantage point that casts Lamesa and its cursed citizens in the golden glow of nostalgia. That might be the creepiest part of revisiting the '80s slasher horror genre as a whole: how innocent and uncomplicated the world it depicts tends to seem, even with a psycho killer on the loose. Maybe it's because the line between good and evil, predator and prey, is so pronounced. Or, as Tolly quips, ''The world's so much simpler when you've got a chain saw in your hand.''
I WAS A TEENAGE SLASHER | By Stephen Graham Jones | Saga Press | 372 pp. | $29.99
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Bollen, Christopher. "American Horror Story." The New York Times Book Review, 25 Aug. 2024, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A805944368/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=27719c46. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
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HOST: AYESHA RASCOE
AYESHA RASCOE: Seventeen-year-old Tolly Driver is a good kid. Well, he's at least not a really bad one. Or he wasn't always bad, but he's been through some bad things. In Stephen Graham Jones' newest novel, "I Was A Teenage Slasher," his luck only gets worse. See, Tolly has a peanut allergy, and before you think it killed him, let me be clear. One fateful night in 1989, it kills everyone around him - or almost everyone. Here to explain more is Stephen Graham Jones himself. Hey, Stephen.
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: Hello.
RASCOE: So let's start with the location, which is really, like, another character in the book. We're in the town of Lamesa, Texas. Describe that for our listeners.
JONES: Well, Lamesa, in 1989, it was maybe 10,000 people. And Lamesa is oil country. It's flat for as far as you can see, mesquite everywhere.
RASCOE: And this is where the lead character, Tolly Driver, is from. Talk to us a little about him.
JONES: Tolly - he's 17. He has a best friend, Amber Big Plume Dennison. They're outsiders together in the whole social scene of Lamesa. They just ride around in her Rabbit truck on Friday night and pretend like they belong.
RASCOE: Well, talk to me about that, 'cause I mean, you often get these stories about outsiders who kind of band together because they're not in with the in clique, and I certainly was never in with any clique. I didn't even have a sidekick. I didn't have nobody. But (laughter)...
JONES: Yeah. Yeah.
RASCOE: I was just outside. But talk to me about this relationship at the center of the novel. Why was it important to you? And do you think that, you know, people can really just relate to that?
JONES: You know, for me, Tolly and Amber's friendship - it's kind of the story of horror, 'cause we as horror fans, I feel like we're always standing at the fence, looking in at the stuff going on in the big tent. And you have your hands hooked up in that chain link. And every once in a while, the side of your hand will touch somebody else's hand, and you've made a connection.
And I think that we get a lot of solidarity in the horror community, and I think that's a big source of it. And that's definitely a big source of it for Tolly and Amber. Amber is more of the horror fan. But they've been on the outside looking in, and their hands finally touched, and they're friends now. They're together for life.
RASCOE: Can you talk to me a little bit about Tolly's evolution into the slasher and the role that Amber plays in that?
JONES: What I used as a model for it was "The Wolf Man" from 1941, where Lawrence Talbot gets infected with the werewolf virus and starts to transform nightly into a werewolf.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE WOLF MAN")
LON CHANEY: (As The Wolf Man, howling).
JONES: I looked really closely at the beats of that story, and I kind of transposed a lot of them into "I Was A Teenage Slasher." And it was really, really helpful 'cause that's a really well-told story. It was a wonderful scaffolding to have.
And so, yeah, Tolly - he doesn't realize at first that these characteristics he's starting to exhibit are actually things that are going to aid him in his justice quest as a slasher. He's not in charge, necessarily. And Amber, as his best friend, wants to help him, wants to save him, and she also has grown up watching slasher films. And she brings the slasher stuff to Tolly to educate him on what he's becoming and what he's going to have to do.
RASCOE: Well, you know, one of your earlier novels, "My Heart Is A Chainsaw," has been called, like, a love letter to the horror genre. But you also really put us into a slasher's head and mind and thinking. Why?
JONES: I wanted to explore the slasher from every angle I can. And with "I Was A Teenage Slasher," I found what feels like a new doorway into the slasher, and that's through the slasher's head, through his eyes, through his voice, through his memory. And I want to understand this genre as well as I can. And so in order to do that, I have to come at it from all angles. And coming at it from the killer's angle seemed like a step I should have taken five or six books ago already.
RASCOE: Obviously, you know, there are slashers that have a lot of personality and backstory. And you know, I've talked a lot about my favorite, Freddy Krueger. But, you know, he was a horrible child murderer. Michael Myers was a child who murdered and then just kept murdering. Jason is more innocent. I mean, he was innocent before he died. But, you know, they're all kind of treated like these unfeeling murder machines. But Tolly Driver isn't that. Like, he has feelings. And throughout the book, I mean, it's clear he doesn't want to kill, right?
JONES: Yeah. No. He doesn't. He wants to give these people who pranked him a pass. He's like, it wasn't that bad. I can live with it. But he is in the story he's in. And when you're in a slasher story, it's very black and white. And Tolly, he wants that gray area. He wants to give people a pass, but he has to fulfill the mission of a slasher. And the mission of a slasher is to pay these people back with a lot of interest. In the slasher world, brutal fairness is the order of the day, and he has to follow that.
RASCOE: I want to go back to that immortal slasher seeking vengeance. You told my colleague Ari Shapiro some years ago that you think people can really connect with that idea of karma for past wrongs. Do you think Tolly follows that tradition? He doesn't really seem to lean into that, even though the people did do him wrong.
JONES: No, you're right. They did do him wrong. They should have been nicer to him. I think any group that is entitled and uses their power against people who are less entitled - they deserve some sort of comeuppance. The question is, how severe should that comeuppance be? And you're right - Tolly doesn't lean into that as hard, except when he is out killing. Then he's an unstoppable machine.
RASCOE: I think you've said in the past that you didn't always want to be a writer, but it just kind of happened. And that seems to be the same for Tolly. I was wondering if you could read this passage, and it's from page 102, and it starts, (reading) at the time, junior going senior.
JONES: (Reading) At the time, junior going senior, before everything that happened happened, I wasn't necessarily thinking about college in any real way - maybe a few classes down at Midland just to see what the tall city was like on the weekends. But I admit that lately I've been watching all these washouts my mom kept having to hire, as it was them or nobody. What I was kind of starting to suspect, or at least sort of see the edges of, was that if I didn't get any schooling, then I was going to be one of them, wasn't I?
RASCOE: How much of you did you put into Tolly?
JONES: A whole lot - that's practically me when I was Tolly's age. I had no plans to be a writer. I was just going to be a farmer or do manual labor my whole life. So it's totally random that I ended up being on the bookshelves.
RASCOE: Why put so much of yourself into a killer?
JONES: Yeah, that's a good question. I probably should have done it differently, so that - such that I'm not indicting myself.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
JONES: But that's the only way I've ever really known to write. My very first novel, I had no idea how to write a novel. But I quickly learned that a novel is, you write 10 or 12 pages, and you hit a wall. You cast about for what happens next, and maybe it takes 10 hours, maybe it takes 10 weeks. And then you finally get the next 10 or 12 pages. Every time I hit that 10 or 12-page wall, I just reached into my head and pulled out a piece of my life and put on the page.
RASCOE: Do you think there's anything worthwhile that we could learn from a slasher?
JONES: You know, I think if we all imagined that we had a slasher standing up out of our shadow who was going to punish us for what we've done wrong, I think we might do less wrong, you know?
RASCOE: That's Stephen Graham Jones. His new novel is "I Was A Teenage Slasher," and it's out this week. Thanks so much for joining us.
JONES: It's been an honor talking to you. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TEENAGERS")
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE: (Singing) They're going to rip up your heads, your aspirations to shreds, another cog in the murder machine. They said all...
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"Stephen Graham Jones on his novel 'I Was a Teenage Slasher'." Weekend Edition Sunday, 14 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A801339385/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=27cfa01f. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
What books are on your night stand?
Grady Hendrix's ''Witchcraft for Wayward Girls,'' CJ Leede's ''American Rapture,'' Stephen King's ''You Like It Darker,'' Emil Ferris's ''My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Book Two),'' the latest issues of Fangoria and Wolverine.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
At the magazine rack of the grocery store we shopped at in Midland, Texas, in 1984, when I was 12, with knees I could still kneel on, when I didn't know The National Enquirer and Weekly World News weren't fact-checked, and my little brother was reading right there beside me.
What book would people be surprised to find on your shelves?
Luigi Meneghello's ''The Outlaws.'' Such a funny, sad, bitter, hopeful novel.
Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?
Don't think so. But I have gotten in trouble for not reading some.
What's the last great book you read?
Rebecca Roanhorse's ''Mirrored Heavens." Wraps that trilogy up as perfectly as I've seen.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
Ursula K. Le Guin's ''The Books of Earthsea.'' Roberto Bolaño's ''The Savage Detectives.'' ''The Moonstone,'' by Wilkie Collins.
How do you sign books for your fans?
I cross my name out then write it for real. I can't use markers on grabby paper. That raspy sound makes me crawl out of my skin like Mr. Krabs, molting.
Do you have a No. 1 fan? Tell me about him/her.
My wife, Nancy. She doesn't read any of my fiction, but believes in me all the same. Has since we were 19.
You describe Tolly, the young hero of your new book, as ''the exact same idiot I am.'' In what ways?
He thinks he's having Big Important Thoughts, but his thinking's really Fairly Pedestrian.
What do you read when you're working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid?
I read what I usually read -- horror, fantasy, science fiction, story collections, paleoanthropology, thrillers, crime, random articles online -- except Philip K. Dick or Vonnegut. Those two get me doing cheap imitations, or just being intimidated away from the page.
Do you always listen to hair metal when you write?
Not exclusively, but, yeah, a whole lot of hair metal, turned up to 11. And Meat Loaf. Cher. George Strait. Waylon. Frank Waln. Bob Seger. The ''Footloose'' soundtrack.
Your acknowledgments alone make for a great read. Have you always put so much into them? Why?
Always have, yeah -- kind of taking Michael Martone's ''Michael Martone'' lead -- but publishers usually tell me I don't have that many pages. Saga doesn't tell me that. They may say it, but not to me. Yet.
What do your English department colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder make of your horror writing?
Lot of them read it, and talk to me about it. It's nice to work with faculty without that inbuilt prejudice against genre. Or, I'm a little bit tall, so it's tricky to look down your nose at me. Unless you lean just way back.
Who are your favorite musician-writers? Your favorite memoir by a musician?
Tom Morello's ''Orchid'' trilogy is some of the best comic-booking I've read. Dave Grohl's ''The Storyteller'' is amazing, and of course Bruce Springsteen's ''Born to Run'' is a model for how to tell your own story. Favorite songwriter, though: Jim Steinman, easy. His heart is my heart.
What's the most terrifying book you've ever read?
Jack Ketchum's ''The Girl Next Door.'' It implicates the reader, makes us complicit. We side with the lesser evil in the story, and think that makes us good, when really it just smears a little wrongness on us, in a way we can't wipe off.
What's a book or movie that scares most people that just doesn't work on you?
Everything scares me. I suspect that's why I write horror.
Is there a kind of scare that books can't provide no matter how hard they try?
Fiction can do anything.
What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
How Paleolithic cave art was made. Or, how Bertrand David and Jean-Jacques Lefrère argue it was made, in ''The Oldest Enigma of Humanity.'' It's completely changed the bedrock of the world, for me.
You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
The Philip K. Dick from late July 1969 -- right after the moon landing, when ''Ubik,'' a moon book, was still new on the shelf. I bet PKD was having some lofty thoughts about then. Octavia Butler late in her career. I'd like to watch the two of them either argue or be instant friends. Or be instant friends and then argue. And then whoever wrote ''Beowulf.'' And of course we're at Red Lobster or Applebee's, in a corner booth. Might have to teach the ''Beowulf'' poet about napkins. But maybe the ''Beowulf'' poet teaches me how a fork fits in an eye socket.
An expanded version of this interview is available at nytimes.com/books.
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"Stephen Graham Jones." The New York Times Book Review, 28 July 2024, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A802791034/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9cf58c4d. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.