Stephen Graham Jones: Where to Begin with the Award-Winning Horror Author

One of the most claustrophobic novels you’ll ever read, this work of psychological horror almost never made it to bookshelves. Jones wrote it and left it, untouched, while he moved on to other projects. When author and editor J. David Osborne founded his independent press, Broken River Books, he reached out to Jones to see if he had anything he was working on. Jones pulled Least of My Scars from his vault and the rest, you could say, is history.

This book is (hopefully) about as close as you’ll get to being stuck in a room with a serial killer. The killer in question is William Colton Hughes, who’s been locked in an apartment, Oldboy-style, by a crime lord hellbent on tapping into the killer’s talents. You can imagine what transpires next, but that’s the catch: Jones knows exactly what you’re expecting and lures you in, only to take the story in directions you could never anticipate.

As the title suggests, the trope being dissected and inspected from the ground up here is the “final girl,” otherwise known as the female character in a slasher film who confronts the killer, survives, and ends up being the one that tells the story. Think of this read as a smarter The Cabin in the Woods; we’re talking metaphysical horror in the best possible way.

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Lindsay Baker is a “final girl,” having survived the heinous slaying of her friends by a killer wearing a Michael Jackson mask. But the murders are where the book begins, not ends. Lindsay involves her friends Izzy and Brittney in her reconstruction of the chain of events in hopes of being, as the title suggests, the “last final girl.” This is a stylistic exhibit of Jones’s encyclopedic eye for horror cinema, complete with screenplay language.

Time to get weird. Like weirder than weird. In a nutshell, Flushboy is about a 16-year-old boy who works at his family’s business: a drive-through urinal. But there’s so much more to the story. It’s angsty and ambitious, the kind of novel that only someone keen on writing for the thrill of the unknown would write. Jones takes the reader through one shift with the flushboy as he is forced to deal with flooding urinals, juggle gallons of warm urine, and even gets caught up in illegal criminal activities and mafia drama. This is Jones demonstrating his range; where most writers would stop at one urinal joke, he takes the concept and turns it into an entire epic novel.

This was the first novel I ever read of Jones’s and for that reason, I’m a bit partial. Written using multiple perspectives, past and present, Jones renders the perspective of Doby Saxon with stunning clarity. Life on the Blackfeet Indian reservation is unlike living anywhere else: Doby survives numerous suicide attempts and witnesses the death of one of his friends. When he manages to survive a near-death experience himself, Doby discovers the hundred-year old story of a Native American agent who served the U.S. government.

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The letters that Doby finds tell a pivotal tale of forgotten history, wherein the agent’s decisions may have singlehandedly affected generations of Blackfeet Indians. In this novel, the reader witnesses another side of Jones’s work; he explores humanity from a historical standpoint and parses out the timelessness of human empathy. I already said I was biased, but this is one story to devour and indulge in the mystery.

Mapping the Interior won the 2018 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Long Fiction—and with good reason. This is a propulsive mindbender of a novella, a first-person descent into the perspective of a 12-year-old boy coping with loss. While wandering around his house late at night, the boy glimpses someone stepping through a doorway; maybe a ghost, maybe something else entirely.

When the boy follows the figure, he finds that his house is much bigger and more malleable than he ever realized. The house morphs like memory seizing the moment, causing him to relive, doubt, and suffer through his own past. Like anyone trying to make sense of the impossible, the boy decides to map the layout of the house and discovers that the closer he gets to completing the effort, the closer he and his loved ones are to danger.

Mongrels is seemingly a werewolf story, and at its core it certainly is—but Jones’s novel deviates from the trope by humanizing his werewolf subjects. Our young unnamed protagonist lives with his Aunt Libby and Uncle Darren, who are both in denial about being werewolves, and shelter the young boy from the truth. Believing themselves to be outsiders, or “mongrels,” they view themselves as people that society has shunned, rather than the other way around.

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Of course, the boy eventually discovers the family secret, and begins to truly explore and embrace a nomadic lifestyle and his werewolf heritage. It’s a coming-of-age story that could have easily fallen flat while it navigated well-traversed narrative territory. However, Jones’s protagonist becomes every bit the heart of the novel, and is the very reason Mongrels transcends horror and becomes a parable for self-discovery.