Jones: I was terrified to write [The Angel of Indiana Lake], of course, because everybody wanted the best for Jade, but they also wanted to be thrilled and everything, so that’s a lot of responsibility, a lot of obligation I had set up for myself. My way of avoiding that responsibility was to try to empty my head in Teenage Slasher. What I mean by that is, that I wanted to explore the slasher dynamic in a way that I hadn’t seen it explored before to save myself from doing the same thing in Indian Lake.
In The Angel of Indian Lake, I knew that the audience was probably not going to tolerate another slasher-hypothesizing thing. They wanted the characters to roll. For me to give the characters space to move, I had to do my slasher hypothesizing somewhere else, and it turned out to be in I Was a Teenage Slasher. But then, because I did go home to write it, it also became a story about me being in high school.
Paste: How does Tolly Driver relate to you? You describe him in the acknowledgments as the kind of “idiot” you were in high school. Are there ways that Tolly sets himself apart from you?
Jones: When I make a character exactly, or not exactly but 95% me, then I feel like I’m operating within really tight boundaries. It’s hard for me to make the character do this or that.
For Tolly, number one, he’s not Indigenous. Number two, he’s shorter than me. I don’t know why that matters, but it matters to me that he’s shorter than me. I think it’s because me being 6′ 4″ in high school, I always got put under the basketball rim as a post. Tolly doesn’t have that pressure on him so he can do other stuff on Friday night if he wants to. He has other dreams.
Tolly and I are very similar to each other. Another way to say it is, that I probably accidentally put too much of myself into Tolly. It’s always a danger when you do that as a writer, because then when people come at the protagonist, at Tolly, saying, “Oh, he’s a stupid kid.”, I’m like, “That hurts.”
Paste: You also have to ride this really interesting line with him of understanding that he is a slasher, he did kill people, and he can’t blame it on anyone else, but he also makes it clear that it’s not just a thing he did, but a thing that happened to him. Was it hard to keep that balance?
Jones: It was really tricky. If I didn’t have the benefit of telling the story 17 years after the fact, I don’t think I could have done it. I don’t think Tolly, at 17, had that kind of objectivity or distance from it. But with all this time to mull it over, I think he’s gone through the cycle of, “I was a victim, I was a victim,” and finally he realizes, “No, I really did that. No matter the reasons, I’m the one who did that to these kids.”
He feels guilty about ruining 1989 for Lamesa, Texas, and for all these parents who should still have their kids. He feels legitimately bad about it, but at the same time, he had no choice. It’s a weird situation to be in. I’m not sure it would fly in a court of law.
Paste: When we talked for Angel of Indian Lake, you mentioned setting a rule for yourself that you couldn’t reference any specific slashers in this book, and you keep Tolly completely in the dark about slasher lore. But then you have his best friend, Amber, who has a pretty good working knowledge of slashers. How did Amber become such a cornerstone of this story for you?
Jones: Initially she was just the one with that Rabbit truck who conks Tolly’s head [early in the novel]. But immediately I realized, “How are we going to trundle the slasher lore into this story?” I knew I couldn’t have another Izzy [from The Last Final Girl] or another Jade [from My Heart is a Chainsaw], because I can’t be the person who only always has a Randy [Randy Meeks, the slasher expert from Scream] in the story. But I figured I could have Amber, who indirectly has access to slasher knowledge through her Army brother, so she can go call him, like a lifeline.
That is an economical move to make in a narrative because otherwise Tolly would have to go to the video rental store and rent slashers and we’d have to watch him watch slashers for four weeks, and that’s not going to be very fun. But also for how the story ends up, it’s important that Amber know it a little bit better than Tolly, I think.
Paste: In some ways, because Tolly’s transformation is also physical in that he gains certain slasher abilities, this is also a body horror story. How did you figure out how Tolly would change and when?
Jones: I had to stage them. I couldn’t do the big ones first. I had to do the little ones that are innocuous first. You notice that vehicles don’t start when Tolly’s touching them, and it takes them a long time to figure out that it’s because he’s a slasher. When you’re in high school, your truck doesn’t start, you’re like, it’s a stupid truck. But it turns out that it’s Tolly. Tolly is the one who’s doing that, because when the slasher is walking up to your vehicle, then of course it’s not going to start until the last possible moment.
But as for how to stage them, I think I had to go from small ones to the big ones. I had to start with trucks not starting, and then end with [bigger attributes]. I had to slowly incrementalize them up and up.
Paste: You said in the acknowledgments that you taught a class called “Found Footage Fiction,” about adding extra reality to stories, which really helped you with this book. What were some of the tools you came away with there that you ended up using here?
Jones: The best tool I came away with from that class, and there’s so many of them, I should list them out and have them handy, but the best one was when a narrator gives you a scene, and then a few pages after that says, “Actually, that’s not how it happened, but that’s a distillation of how it felt.” That to me, creates a dynamic of honesty, which makes everything else true by association.
There’s so many little dynamics like that in what I call “Found Footage Fiction,” which isn’t quite autofiction, and it’s not really a fake memoir. It’s just Found Footage Fiction. It’s fiction that tricks the reader with certain techniques and dynamics into investing in and buying into the reality of what’s being told here. Even though it’s just super absurd, it’s supernatural, I’m not sure how I’d classify it really. It’s beyond things you would normally accept. Therefore, I as the writer have to use all these techniques and dynamics to get the reader to accept it. That to me, is so, so fun. I love that so much.
Paste: I want to talk a little about Texas here, as a native Texan myself. You have so many little moments where Tolly sort of explains what a pumpjack is, what a stock tank is, things like that any country kid from Texas would know, and these descriptions add a lot of texture to the book. Why was it important for you to have Tolly break all that stuff down for the reader?
Jones: The reason I did it, as a writer, was that I know that you and me and maybe six other people know West Texas, but not a lot of people know what it’s like to hear pump jacks at night out in the darkness and everything. So, I had to figure out a way to make it real to them, to make it lived in and not super exotic, if that makes sense.
Tolly, I feel his motivation for doing that is that this is basically a manuscript he’s leaving [behind], so he doesn’t actually know who’s going to find it. Anybody could find it, and they’re probably not going to be from West Texas, so he’s going to have to explain all this stuff to them.
Paste: You talked a lot when the Jade Daniels books were coming out about slashers as justice fantasies, and how they feel very vital right now because the world feels so unjust. Here, you have a guy who’s ruminating on that sense of justice, but he’s also the guy doing the slashing. How did writing from the POV of the slasher change your view of slashers as justice fantasies?
Jones: You know, you’re right. It does complicate it, for sure. I do still think that the slasher is a justice fantasy, yes, but I don’t think Tolly would say that. I don’t think someone inside the story would say that. The audience, when they look at it on a screen or on a page or wherever they look at it, I think to the audience, it’s a justice fantasy. I think to the characters in it, they don’t have that bird’s-eye view of it. To them, it’s just something terrible they have to try to survive.
But, you’re right. Tolly, 17 years later, he is thinking about “How is this justice?” And he’s one of those rare slashers who has both survived and isn’t living in a sewage tunnel or whatever, like Michael Myers, so he has the luxury of being able to write a little bit.
Paste: At the end of Angel of Indian Lake, you talked about the impact that the Uvalde mass shooting had on you, and your desire to not write about violence against young people unless it felt like it meant something. Now you’ve got a novel from the point of view of a young killer, and it’s harrowing for him. How was it for you, just emotionally, writing about this kind of death in a horror novel? And how did you make it mean something in your own mind, as well as make it mean something on the page?
Jones: That’s a really good question, I had not thought of that. But now I’m realizing that I think the way I made it matter was I made each death as off-putting as possible so that I can foreground the terribleness of it. I guess what I’m always afraid of is that I’m going to turn these deaths and these slashers into spectacles that people are clapping for. I don’t know if that’s dangerous, but it feels scary in some fashion.
It’s almost like that’s the way I punish myself for doing this violence to these characters, is that I make myself write it as goopy and off-putting as possible. I feel like I’d be giving myself an out if Tolly just rode by on a motorcycle and lopped somebody’s head off with a machete. That to me, doesn’t hurt as much. It doesn’t hurt as much to me, as a writer, to have to write that.
I guess what I’m saying is that my metric is; If it doesn’t hurt me a lot to write it, then why is anybody going to want to read it?
Paste: You’ve written quite a few slashers now. Do you still feel like you have more to say about the slasher genre after this?
Jones: I totally do. Actually, the other day I was on my bike, and I thought of a new way to do a slasher, which I’m so excited about. It’s a way that it’s never been done before. And then, last night I was doing something and I thought of a second way. So, I’ve got at least two more slashers in me. But I think there’s a lot more than that.
But I’ll be mixing them in with vampire stories, haunted house stories, possession stories, and everything else.
Paste: Before we go, I wanted to ask about The Buffalo Hunter Hunter [out March 18, 2025]. You said a while ago that you were working on a vampire story, and now we know this is it. What can you tell us about it?
Jones: Maybe I can talk about my models for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I was thinking a lot of Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places. That has three threads that braid together. To me, that’s how The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is. It’s three threads that braid together. Or Gertrude Stein has her book, Three Lives, which I don’t know if I would call that a collection of novellas or if I’d call it a novel, but I like that indefiniteness.
To tell you the truth, this three-part structure, I did it with the Indian Lake Trilogy, but Demon Theory is also that three-part thing. For some reason, I’m really attracted to threes in narrative, and I’ll probably keep doing it for my whole career, every chance I get anyway. But The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, it comes directly from a bad massacre that happened in 1870 to the Blackfeet. And how do you get revenge for that? What can you even count as revenge for that? Is there anything that can count as revenge for that?
To tell you the truth, it is a vampire story, but I’m still interrogating what justice is.
I Was a Teenage Slasher is available now wherever books are sold.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.
