49 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen Graham JonesA 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 Summaries & Analyses
The present-day Tolly apologizes to the parents of the teens he killed, then wonders if Amber ever had children of her own.
Returning to the narrative, Tolly and Amber escape the party and stop at a cotton field, where they wash up using the overhead sprinklers. As Tolly recovers from the shock of the massacre, Amber comments that Deek hasn’t fully escaped Justin’s wrath yet. Amber explains to Tolly that the recent events are fitting into the pattern of a slasher movie, drawing from her experience watching them with her older brother. If Justin is a slasher, then Stace is his final girl. The slasher theory also explains how Justin managed to escape after Stace tied him to the diving board.
They drive to a cotton gin to gas up Amber’s truck, but they must walk the rest of the way after the truck runs out of gas. They encounter Sheriff Burke, the first female sheriff in the county, on Tolly’s street. She came to Tolly’s house after hearing initial reports that Tolly was the only person who died at Deek’s party.
Since Justin and Stace are missing, they cannot support Tolly’s complete account of events. Tolly instead tells Sheriff Burke everything that happened at the party up until the point his anaphylactic shock had ended.
By Stephen Graham Jones