My Heart Is a Chainsaw

This book sucked me in almost from the moment I picked it up, and for the first half of it, I couldn't stop reading it. I was in love with the voice, the style, the compulsively readable plot--pretty much everything. Though the voice was sometimes exhausting, it was exhausting in a good way, pulling me along and taking me back to the days of being a teenager with all of the angst/doubt/wonder/imagination/outsiderness involved. (Make no mistake, though, this is not a YA book--it's an Adult book with a teenaager protagonist, and there is a big difference.)

So, why did it take me so long to finish, and why did I call such attention to the first half being so readable? That's more complicated, and to be fair, I'm not sure how much is show more related to the book and how much to me. I was reading this with my book club, and at a certain point, I stopped being able to keep up simply because I didn't have quite enough time. And then I was on to reading another book with them, and this one got left in the dust for a week or so. And then when I did get back to it, the adrenaline rush of the last third of the book especially was just...well, a lot. Kind of like an action movie where the action just never stops, so there's not enough of an emotional ride or enough of a break from the action to really appreciate what's unfolding. I understand why the book unfolded as it did, and I enjoyed the whole of it in a lot of ways...but the last third is one long adrenaline ride, and that part wore on me a bit. At the same time, I was dealing with a lot of stress (including a hurricane evacuation and lack of electricity), so maybe that exhaustion was partly on me? It's hard to tell, but what it comes down to is that for much of the read this was a five-star book for me, and then it dropped a star by the end simply because the last third was so break-neck that I was being rushed along more than engaged for a lot of it.

Still, I'd recommend the book to horror lovers, and I'm absolutely looking forward to reading more of Jones' work. show less

This book was never predictable, and Stephen Graham Jones's encyclopedic knowledge of slashers kept him (through the excellent main character, wholly original plot, and storytelling structure) constantly nodding at and playing with the genre. It kept me curious and invested (and, yeah, scared) the entire read. Definitely not recommended if you're squeamish because, as always, SGJ does not screw around.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are all sorts of ways to read a Stephen Graham Jones book. Surfaces work...there's always a story hanging around, you won't be wandering lost in thickets of writing-armpit sweat-watered weeds...references work too, you can unpick your memories of the midnight movies or frightfrests your friends threw (or open IMDb if you're really young)...but I think the best way is to make it through as it's happening, to be there as Jade walks across the graduation stage or through walls or up into skies limited only by the basic laws of physics.

The reason I feel that last works best is that, by the time I'd reached the end of this read, and then read Author Stephen's show more Acknowledgments after the wrenching and impossibly sad final scene, I was so wrung out that I simply accepted that everything I'd just been through had been intended to do what it did to me. As I'm not one to write book reports (ask Mr. Singleton! never turned so much as one in during high school) I'm not going to try to do that at this late date. I referred to this book's immediate older sibling, The Only Good Indians, as "gore with more" and that's an assessment I stand by as applied to all of Author Stephen's books. Part of that "more" is the strangely hypnotic effect of the story arc receding from view...the interstitial "SLASHER 101" essays addressed to the One Good Teacher (of history, naturally) Mr. Holmes are well and truly weirding Your Faithful Reader out. When they switch addressees, it gets even weirder...but in the end, it's painfully intimate and deeply instructive to read them.

In common with all Author Stephen's books, you mere peon of a purchaser have no rights. You're not stupid, you've read some of his other work (at least The Only Good Indians!), you're aware that horror is in store. So surrender your volition. Then the entire experience of being in Jade Daniels's rage-filled head makes all the sense in the world. Because then you're not actually sure if ANY of this is happening in meatspace. Is this an adolescent with anger and abandonment issues responding to the end of what never was childhood? Is this a young woman processing the pain and rage of a life that was wished on her by weaker, worse people than she was? There's a sparkling moment of fizzing delight when Jade meets Letha, a beautiful rich kid whose father has a trophy wife and whose presence in the town of "Proofrock" (think a minute, and hard, for more than the surface snicker; that's all it takes to turn it into a shiver), when Jade anoints her "the Final Girl." That's both when the tale gets grounded in consensus reality and when its ascent into the dark and cold vault of Jade's own head is cemented.

I'm always a fan of gerunding done with panache...Author Stephen does it with panache. At one point, Jade Holden Caulfields across a lawn, and that's me dead cackling. I think there are few greater pleasures than easter-egging your readers' experience...hoping they'll get most of them. I think the fun of reading a book whose author has chosen a niche to write in, one with an astoundingly vast mythos/history/background to explore, is in part the recognition factor of word-play. Yes, it's about slasher-film homage, and no Holden Caulfield isn't slashed to death (though generations of English students have no doubt fantasized that Salinger met that fate after writing it), but he *is* the prototype of the Angsty Teen too smart for easy answers. With everything Jade's carrying around, she's not one whit less burdened than Holden and possibly by some similar troubles given that she's got A Thing growing up strong for Letha.

Adolescent sexuality is always fraught. Parents play their roles in shaping it, either with rule or without them, with clamp-downs or without supervision, there's no right way to ride this roller-coaster. But the issue facing Jade isn't made any easier by her absolute conviction that Letha is The Final Girl, that staple of the slasher film, therefore of necessity being lustrous and almost superhuman in her glorious Otherness. That's how she's supposed to be, right? Jade "doesn't make the rules...just happens to know them all." Her unique and defining obsession with slashers is gong to pay dividends, right? Because she's preparing the Final Girl for her role, unlike most...she won't be surprised by the tragedies.

I think I speak for all readers when I say that the way this blows up can only be described as FUCKING EPIC.

And from that point on, the cigarette boat is away and the pace does not let up.

There are the obligatory twists and turns, the reveals that aren't *quite* reveals, and the accustomed ways that Author Stephen's practiced to get your kishkes kicking and your shvitzer sprinkling. You can't fault the man on delivering the suspenseful goods! If you're in the market for a low-gore delivery of suspense, however, look elsewhere. The way this works is for your expectations to be manipulated so I won't be discussing particulars. Suffice to say I was taken in. More than once. And I'm a pretty well-broken-in reader....

Still, there's no point it wondering why no good deed goes unpunished or how exactly it is that one's expected to walk away from what can not help but feel like a set up straight from a film. The pain and the passionate pull of it will reach some screeching crescendo, won't it, just give it a little more time and it has to!

Nonsense, says the Great God Author.

By the time we've reached the moment when there is no more to give, when the entire story's gone to the most extreme place that it can go...there is something more in the tank for a send-off, and there's no way that you'll believe your eyes when you get there.

Some things just can't be put right. And others can't be left wrong. The issue is...who decides. show less

Jade has learned to lean into being the scary girl, the one who smokes and is obsessed with slasher films, the one who stands on her own off to the side with a disdainful expression on her face. In the small mountain town in Idaho where she grew up, she stands out. But just around time for her to graduate from high school and leave the town of Proofrock behind her forever, things start to happen, things that only Jade can see are linked together, very bad things. And now she has to try to prepare people for what is coming, from the new girl Jade recognizes as a "final girl," to the chief of police, to the retiring high school history teacher who is the closest thing she has to a friend. But just knowing bad things are happening is not show more enough to stop them sometimes.

This is the first of a trilogy and the author's homage to the slasher movies of the seventies and eighties (with more than a few shout-outs to the Scream franchise). It's certainly a testament to both Jones's writing and his sheer enthusiasm that I happily kept turning pages despite how much slasher films bore me. Jade is both a delightful character and a dark one and the way Jones kept the tone of the novel flipping between lightness and horror was engaging. show less

Heartrending, in every sense of the word. A half-Indian girl full of fierce, piercing rage, whose life's one solace is slasher films, is thrilled when signs begin to point to the slasher she's been waiting and hoping for having come to her small Idaho town. Jade watches the unfolding events and predicts the next steps, and like an angry teen Cassandra even tries to spread the word—though she knows, like all good horror film buffs, that no authority figure will believe her or be of any use. But what she doesn't expect is also the last thing she wants—that through her unheeded warnings and explanations of the developing horror, someone might begin to decipher her own history, and what lies beneath her pain and episodes of self-harm. show more Bloody, funny, grotesque, and a great read. Jade's thoughts on the cleansing cycle of the slasher movie, from first blood to final girl, are presented between chapters in the form of her essays for a sympathetic high school teacher and are fascinating for entry- and expert-level horror fans alike. show less

Jade Daniel's life is a mess, so she messes back at life, mostly by obsessing on slasher films. On the summer of her graduation her horror dreams appear to be coming true - a slasher is targeting her lakeside town, all the signs are there, the problem is can she get anyone to believe her warnings before the cycle spins up? Of course she can't and she knows it, that's how the slasher cycle works, all she can do is get ready to ride it out, probably not surviving because that's not who she is, and provide a few tips for the one person she has singled out as the Final Girl. She's wrong abiyt a lot of things, though. But that's the thing about slashers - the best ones keep you on your toes. When it isn't chopping them off.

A love letter to show more horror, a portrait of trauma and obsession, an examination of social inequality and the legacies of colonialism, and finally just a good old-fashioned water-borne massacre. What's not to love? To be honest there's only a few of the current crop of horror writers who combine literay writing with horror who can carry it off - the literariness sometimes swamps the horror, or the horror sometimes undermines the literariness, either way it just doesn't quite mesh for me - but Stephen Graham Jones, like a select few others, carries it off. show less

Seventeen year-old Jade is obsessed with slasher movies to the point that in any given situation, she's thinking about how a movie character behaved. She often sees herself as a character in one of these movies, usually as the killer.
Living in a very small town in Idaho with her lousy father and a mother who moved out but remained close enough for Jade to wonder why she isn't involved in her daughter's life, Jade is the outcast in town, the weirdo everyone stays away from. Then a group of super wealthy people arrive and buy up the land the abandoned summer camp sits on, which is surrounded by the cursed lake. The lower working class townspeople hate the newcomers, who respond with good jobs and opportunities for the kids, but their show more arrival also brings a string of deaths, and people wonder if Jade finally making good on her wish that a slasher would come to the town where she was never accepted?
This is a 400 page deep dive into 80s slasher flicks, most of it taking place in Jade's head as she constantly reminds herself of plots and how characters responded. It's about 100 pages too long. Being in the head of someone as messed up as Jade can get tedious as she flits between reality and fantasy. Not to say this isn't well-written, it is, and it takes in the history of everyone in her life, but all her anger, resentment and movie info became a blur about page 200, though the action picks up around 300 pages in. show less