Final Slash Boy is a taut, incendiary collection that melds queer desire, pop horror and personal hauntology into a lyric of resistance and reclamation. Channelling the tropes of slasher cinema, Mills interrogates survival, gendered violence and the figure of the "Final Boy" as both myth and mirror. These poems are sharp-edged, sexually charged, and formally agile—moving between elegy, confession and cultural critique with electric precision. Through repetition, fragmentation and reclamatory camp, Mills crafts a poetics that is at once vulnerable and defiant, haunted and transgressive.
PRAISE for Final Slash Boy:
In Stephen S. Mills’s highly anticipated fourth collection, Final Slash Boy, we find him at the height of his lyrical powers, returning to his familiar themes of queer love and desire, this time mapped against the arc of horror films. Alternating between erasures and deconstructed prose poems, Mills offers a parallax vision of art and life; genre convention and formal innovation; film theory and lived experience. Reading this book was as delightful as drinking a smoothie—the flavors hitting all at once. I can’t help thinking that Mills has put everything in a blender and hit puree! Those dangerous little blades at the bottom of the machine are almost an ars poetica, here. Drink deep reader, drink deep.
— Jason Schneiderman
What does it mean to survive? Final Slash Boy poses this question, rooted in the history of horror films but blooming in contemporary America where ‘there’s never time / enough to grieve.’ Real murders, homophobic violence, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the covid pandemic prove to be the kinds of tests that reveal the identity of the Final Girl—here adamantly a Final Boy, the queered version. As the speaker of many of these poems, Final Boy’s past and present mingle in stark contrast to his future. Like the survivors of the films inspiring these poems, Final Boy lives, but more than that, he insists on thriving despite the horrors. The stylistic use of slashes throughout these prose poems suggest how easily our words can be sliced up. While the seams may show, the messages come to us scarred, but healed. This is a smart, innovative, and unrelenting collection.
— Charles Jensen