Popverse's top stories

• Netflix loses its Black Mirror creators as Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones have used a loophole to get out of their exclusive deal with the streamer
• 3 essential Superman stories to watch or read after seeing the new James Gunn movie from DC Studios [FYC]
• A live-action TV version for the controversial webtoon The Elementary School Student That I Love has been canceled because it's about an elementary school teacher sexualizing a 5th grader

I don't think there's a horror subgenre that gets me more riled up than slashers. I found this out the hard way when I went on a slasher (watching) spree last spring, where I threw up my arms in Martin Scorsese fashion, declaring "absolute cinema" after films like Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood and Dario Argento's Tenebre, Deep Red, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, Eli Roth's Thanksgiving filled me with such rage that I needed to take a walk afterwards, like I was Spock's dysfunctional cousin, just to cool off from how much I hated it. Thanksgiving had left me feeling like someone had vacuumed out chunks of my brain, leaving me the opposite of enlightened. I felt like the chicken that Werner Herzog had once "looked in the eye with great intensity," finding only an "overwhelming" abyss of stupidity gazing back at him. That, in itself, was its own type of horror. 

Horror is where I go to think. When reading or watching a horror story, I remain aware of how the story is making me feel emotionally or physically, and I enjoy unpacking the 'why' and the 'how' behind my reactions afterwards. It's a lot like therapy, I guess. Recent Hollywood slashers like Thanksgiving weren't giving me that psychic food anymore. The last couple Scream movies have been alright, but they don't have the edge of the original movies from the 90s. I needed a change. 

I was able to find nourishment in the written word - slasher novels, to be exact. While the love that they have with their cinematic cousins is undeniable, slasher novels have been the healing balm my brain sorely needed after Thanksgiving, even repairing my relationship with the subgenre. This is probably how Gordon Ramsay felt when he said "finally, some good fucking food" on Kitchen Nightmares.

Stephen Graham Jones's slasher novels cut deeper than slasher movies today

Slasher novels aren't bound by the same boring Hollywood sensibilities that dominate the multiplexes today, because it's much less expensive to bring a slasher novel into existence than it is a slasher film. As a result, stories are limited only by the imaginations of their writers, instead of the laws of physics, studio economics, and Hollywood biases. When I open a slasher book, it's an invitation for the writer to hit me with their best shot. Come up with an absolutely bonkers way for someone to die, and tell it to me in a way that I've never seen before. Show me a place that I've never been to before, and populate it with characters whose deaths I would avenge at the drop of a hat. 

Three sets of slasher books have revitalized the subgenre for me: Stephen Graham Jones's Indian Lake trilogy, I Was A Teenage Slasher (also by Stephen Graham Jones), and Philip Fracassi's The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, which comes out in September. Even though they're all slashers, they push the envelope of what we expect from slasher stories in their own unique ways. If you're anything like me, and gravitate towards horror in general for that type of boundary-pushing work, then you've come to the right place. 

The Indian Lake trilogy from Stephen Graham Jones - My Heart is a Chainsaw, Don't Fear The Reaper, and The Angel of Indian Lake - centers on a Native girl in Idaho named Jade Daniels who is obsessed with slasher movies. When a series of killings erupt across her town, which has recently received an influx of rich people looking to develop the land, Jade's slasher Spidey Senses are activated. Hidden within this love letter to slasher movies is a story that examines how the vulnerable find safety and deliverance in the most unlikely of places, and the superhuman strength we can find in the face of forces threatening to eviscerate everything we love. Jade became like a younger sister to me across the three books, and I've never been more invested in a slasher character before. 

Across the Indian Lake trilogy and I Was A Teenage Slasher, Jones's prose is a masterclass in building characterization, voice, and suspense. It's part of why I don't miss watching contemporary American slasher movies, because your average Hollywood slasher is shot in such a boring, traditional style. Jones's slasher novels season the beats of a slasher story with language that is utterly intoxicating to read. By the end of the story, the protagonists are living inside your head. 

Philip Fracassi's The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre features characters you'd likely never see in a Hollywood slasher movie

While Stephen Graham Jones's slasher books feature younger characters, Philip Fracassi takes the opposite approach with The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, a slasher that is set inside a retirement home. I don't know what it's like to be an old person yet (I mean like OLD old, not old enough to have memories of using a fax machine), so it was fascinating to dive into the lives of residents at an old folks' home in New York. I find most teenagers in slasher movies annoying, and it was refreshing to meet a cast of old people whom I legitimately would want to sit down and get to know - outside of the slasher story happening, of course. It makes their deaths all the more heartbreaking, ratcheting the stakes of the story up even further. Too often in lesser slashers, the meaning of dying a violent death isn't extrapolated on. But in The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, as in Stephen Graham Jones's books as well, this overlooked detail gets exhumed for the pearl that it is. Hollywood should take notice. 

A slasher in an old folks' home also brings some scintillating challenges. For instance, how do you fight off a slasher in the prime of their life when you're 80 years and have arthritis and a heart problem? How do you sound the alarm that there is indeed a murderer rampaging around your retirement community, where death is already part of the status quo? Fracassi leans into the particularities of his story's setting, and the story pays off handsomely for it. I'm usually good at working out the identity of a slasher before it's revealed, but Fracassi was able to fool me. Pure food for the brain and the heart. 

Perhaps the greatest strength of slasher novels is that they give the writer the chance to build out the backstory and emotional state of the characters, along with the history of the world they live in, far more than in your average Hollywood slasher movie. In other words, a good slasher novel just cuts deeper than a story could onscreen. Maybe it's my depression, or the fact that Linkin Park's seminal song, "Numb," hit my eardrums before my brain was finished cooking, but I want to get thoughts and feelings from a story. I just feel empty otherwise. The slasher novels I've written about here all hit that psychic sweet spot for me. Maybe they will for you, too. 

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A reading guide to Cassandar Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.