“We thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all…” Stephen Graham Jones writes some killer opening lines. If you’ve been following this blog lately, you’ll know that Jones is swiftly becoming one of my favorite horror writers, especially with his recent masterpiece The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. But Jones is a prolific writer who had published over a dozen books before his star really started to rise. Now that his writing is getting the attention it deserves, his publisher is very cleverly re-releasing some of his earlier books that flew under the radar. One of those is the novella Night of the Mannequins, which initially came out in 2020 amidst the chaos of the pandemic, but got a second chance with a new release this past February. And I’m glad it did! Reading this fun little slasher tale now, you can see Stephen Graham Jones playing around with ideas that he would explore more deeply in later books like My Heart Is a Chainsaw and I Was a Teenage Slasher. Continue reading Review of Night of the Mannequins—Slashers vs Superheroes
Tag: slasher
Review of I Was a Teenage Slasher
Have you ever wondered what goes through a slasher’s mind as he goes on his bloody rampage? If you’ve read any of Stephen Graham Jones’s other novels (such as My Heart is a Chainsaw or The Only Good Indians), you’ll notice that Jones is fascinated by classic slasher films and their tropes and often uses these topics as a lens through which to explore deeper issues. In his latest horror novel, I Was a Teenage Slasher, which came out last month, he returns to this topic once again but from a new perspective: that of a reluctant killer. Continue reading Review of I Was a Teenage Slasher
Review of My Heart Is a Chainsaw
What if your life suddenly turned into a slasher movie? For most of us, that idea is fodder for our most terrifying nightmares, but Jade Daniels is thrilled by the prospect in Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart Is a Chainsaw. From the moment I read The Only Good Indians just over a year ago, I knew that Stephen Graham Jones was one of the horror writers to be watching right now. Reading his latest novel has only confirmed that assessment. My Heart Is a Chainsaw came out in August of 2021 and is a brilliant self-aware homage to the horror genre. Continue reading Review of My Heart Is a Chainsaw