49 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen Graham JonesI Was a Teenage Slasher
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Friday”
Content Warning: The source material for this study guide depicts extreme violence and gore. The novel also references self-harm, death by suicide, and suggested child abuse.
Tolly Driver introduces himself as a slasher who killed six people in his hometown of Lamesa, Texas, when he was 17 years old. He explains that he is writing his story down for his best friend, Amber Big Plume Dennison, with whom he has lost contact since then. He apologetically suggests that he never wanted to become a slasher and the only reason it happened was because of his peanut allergy.
Tolly recounts the events of July 1989. He and Amber are driving to high school alumnus Deek Masterson’s house party. Tolly nervously anticipates that he might get a chance to talk to his crush and former babysitter, Stace Goodkin. When Amber hears this, she pulls the emergency brake, causing Tolly’s car seat to rush forward and crack his head on the windshield. She teases him about Stace, so Tolly gets back at her by lurching the truck forward, causing Amber to lose her family heirloom silver-feather earring.
Entering the party, Tolly is conscious of his reputation as the “fragile” kid with a peanut allergy. His self-consciousness is exacerbated by the grief of losing his father in a driving accident. Amber points Stace out to him at a volume loud enough for others to hear, which catches Deek’s attention.
Tolly explains that Deek’s clique formed the Future Farmers of America Leadership team back when they were in high school. Several years earlier, an unpopular boy named Justin Joss desperately wanted to join their clique and was invited to do the initiation rite of riding a pumpjack. Stace arrived at the initiation to stop them, having belatedly realized why none of their group showed up to after-school Leadership practice. It was too late, however, as Justin fell into the counterweights and died of dismemberment. At the funeral of his father, Tolly came across Justin’s grave when one of Deek’s friends cut himself on a rose thorn and bled on Justin’s headstone. Tolly recognized Justin’s grave from the drill bit that had been left in honor of him.
Unlike Amber, who settles into a conversation, Tolly wanders around the party, hoping Stace will notice him. Deek’s friends serve Tolly rum cola, which gets him drunk enough to vomit into the barbecue grill out back. Tolly clumsily bumps into various things, like a floor lamp and a sliding glass door. Although he feels embarrassed, he carries on drinking at the party, trying to prove that he has moved past his grief and fragility. Amber pulls him aside to tell him to temper his behavior. Tolly takes that as a sign to move to the backyard.
Outside, Tolly drunkenly decides to do a cannonball dive into the swimming pool. The water splashes on a baton twirler, Mel Boanerges, and her friend. They pull Tolly out of the pool, after which he vomits again. The other marching band members come and strap Tolly down to a patio chair, where they force him to drink a cocktail spiked with what Tolly initially assumes is aspirin. He soon learns that the cocktail is spiked with peanuts, following a trend popular among Texan teens at the time.
Tolly experiences anaphylaxis, which the marching band don’t recognize at first. Stace notices what is happening from inside the house and runs to Amber to retrieve Tolly’s EpiPen. Tolly sees Death standing nearby as a rotted corpse with an inflated head. Stace administers the EpiPen, saving Tolly’s life.
When Tolly regains consciousness, he sees Amber rubbing ice on his face. Most of the partygoers have left, hoping to escape scrutiny from the emergency services already on the way to help Tolly. The only people remaining, apart from Tolly and Amber, are Deek’s clique. While checking to see if Tolly is okay, they notice a stranger standing across the pool. Tolly thinks it is still Death, but it turns out to be the reanimated corpse of Justin Joss, carrying the drill bit in the place of his left hand.
Deek’s friends try to fight back Justin but are unable to stop him from violently killing the clique members with the drill bit. Amber throws margarita tumblers rimmed with salt at Justin to distract him. The salt sizzles against Justin’s skin, recalling the fact that Justin used to eat salt to get approval from his peers in school. Deek escapes the party. Amber tries to free Tolly from the patio chair. Stace faces down Justin with an axe and a canvas tarp. She expresses her sympathy for Justin, then uses the tarp to stall Justin’s drill bit. She drives the axe into Justin’s neck, spilling his blood onto Tolly. She then uses a clothesline to push Justin into the pool, hoping to tie his neck around the diving board. Justin manages to slam Stace’s body against the poolside, seriously injuring her. Justin remains trapped by the clothesline cable and is unable to finish her off.
Tolly and Amber decide to leave the party as emergency services arrive, believing they can take care of Stace’s injuries. Justin seemingly disappears when no one is looking. When Tolly and Amber get into Amber’s truck, Amber points out that Justin’s blood has gotten all over Tolly’s face. Tolly instinctively wipes it across his forehead, allowing Justin’s blood to enter the wound that opened when Tolly hit the windshield earlier that night.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The first chapter of the novel introduces the central characters and their dynamics and establishes the genre conventions of the slasher movie, which serve as an important foundation for the novel to unfold.
Tolly Driver introduces himself as a teenage slasher, but his role in the narrative aligns more generically to that of an antihero. Traditionally, antiheroes are defined by their moral ambiguity. They perform actions that could be considered morally good from one perspective but bad from another. While most people see Tolly as a villain, the novel gives Tolly a platform to air his side of the story, making it clear that he is a protagonist. Even then, the moral position of the novel remains murky. While he tries to distance himself from his slasher persona, he also takes responsibility for six of the murders that will take place over the next few chapters. It is thus implied that Tolly thinks that he had been forced into his situation and that part of his internal tension as a narrator comes from working out how to atone for the sins for which he isn’t fully culpable. The arc of the novel is not only meant to show how and why he commits those murders, but how he reckons with those actions in the years that follow. This introduces the theme of Fate Versus Free Will by presenting the question of whether Tolly was always doomed to become a slasher or if, in retrospect, there was ever a point he could have turned away from his fate.
Tolly finds a mirror in Justin Joss, whose desperation for social acceptance is a fatal flaw. Tolly is not as unpopular as Justin but feels that way in the context of the party where this chapter takes place. Hence, Justin’s death becomes a cautionary tale for Tolly, warning him not to seek the approval of his peers at the party. Two things obstruct his ability to avoid Justin’s fate: the fresh grief of losing his father and the desire for Stace’s acceptance. Because he wants Stace to acknowledge and validate his grief, he does things to embolden himself to talk to her like taking drinks. He also tries to catch her attention by roaming near her and diving into the pool. Importantly, he never actually musters the courage to talk to her, because he feels his position in the social hierarchy of their school is too low to initiate a conversation. This is despite the fact he and Stace have interacted before, back when Stace was his babysitter. Tolly’s grief reinforces his self-perception, driving one of the major themes of the novel, Grief and the Struggle for Social Acceptance.
When Tolly experiences humiliation at the hands of the marching band, he unknowingly fulfills the first of the slasher movie conventions—the original sin. Although Tolly had acted foolishly, the punishment he receives comes across as being excessive. This offers a critical assessment of the social rules that justify their cruelty. Tolly embarrasses a member of the marching band and is nearly killed as a result. Though his life is saved, none of his transgressors remain to apologize or make up for the fault. This suggests that perhaps the only way to balance the scales of justice for Tolly is to act excessively against them as well. The slippery slope of this logic drives a third major theme, The Perils of Revenge.
Justin’s assault on the party foreshadows everything that Tolly will soon experience, from his supernatural prowess for killing to the appearance of the final girl. Although Tolly has yet to learn about the slasher genre conventions, many familiar with those conventions will recognize tropes playing out, including Stace’s fulfillment of the final girl role. Stace fits the final girl archetype because of her affinity with the group that committed the original sin—pressuring Justin into the deadly initiation rite—and her distance from the activity itself. Consequently, Amber could turn out to be Tolly’s final girl because of her distance from Tolly’s humiliation as it is happening. At the same time, she also displays affinity because she fits so well into the party crowd that had previously seen both her and Tolly as outsiders. If Amber is meant to be the final girl, then her ability to face Tolly down will be complicated by their relationship. It is clear from the way Tolly speaks of Amber that he still has plenty of affection for her, even years after the fact.
On the other hand, it is ironic that Amber unwittingly contributes to Tolly’s transformation by causing the open wound that Justin’s blood seeps into. Tolly’s unwitting gesture adds to the irony, wiping the blood on his forehead in a way that catalyzes his “infection.” It underlines the sense of destiny by tracing the forthcoming violence back to decisions that were so unconscious, it was nearly impossible for Tolly to avoid. Considering Tolly’s motivations for revenge, his transformation into a slasher—catalyzed by Justin’s blood—could almost be considered incidental.
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By Stephen Graham Jones
