“Stephen Graham Jones … has carved out a niche for himself in horror fiction. A stabby, slashy, bloody niche where his unique voice stands entirely on its own.” – Sadie Hartman, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered
… this is the real world, not a movie, and the real world doesn’t have to follow any special rules. It just does what it does. You can’t pick your genre, no. Has that been what Jade’s been doing all along? Trying to shape an unwieldy string of dead people into a movie, just so she can have a minor role? So she can feel some sense of control?
…this night isn’t a night, it’s a series of heart attacks waiting to happen.
–from My Heart is a Chainsaw
The small mountain town of Proofrock, Idaho (T. S. Eliot, anyone?) sits beside Indian Lake. Proofrock has some disreputable history, for instance, the lake is really a reservoir formed by damming Indian Creek, at the bottom of which lies Drown Town, officially known as Henderson-Golding after the town’s founders, and locally famous for the former having killed the latter with a pickaxe. Drown Town also includes Ezekiel’s church, also Ezekiel and some portion of Ezekiel’s flock. The lake is also famous locally for the attempted drowning of Stacey Graves: Letch Graves had murdered his wife, Jessie, and local boys tossed her grieving young daughter into the lake. Or, rather, onto the lake. Legend has it Jessie was a witch, and Stacey took after her mom, hitting the water, staying on its surface and running across to the other side.
In the here and now, just before Independence Day of 2015, seventeen-year-old Jennifer “Jade” Daniels is a senior in high school and has lived in Proofrock her entire life. Jade is one of only two Native Americans living in Proofrock, her father, Tab, being the other. And that’s one reason she’s an outsider: Her mother left Tab years ago, so Jade stays with her father, coping with his drinking and with his one friend who makes suggestive comments, often in front of her father, and wary of the other who, as a teen, was connected to the death of Sheriff Hardy’s teenage daughter.
Jade uses slasher movies as a coping mechanism, both the watching of and the gathering of information and trivia about. Her main support comes from Sheriff Hardy, who got her a part-time janitorial job at the school, and from her history teacher, Mr. Holmes, who accepts her history papers written through her slasher movie focus. From him she’s learned the fraught history of Idaho and Proofrock, and especially the history of Native Americans in the area.
Jade wishes for excitement. She wishes for a slasher. Like, maybe a slasher could come to Proofrock and burn the town down. One advantage to wearing a slasher lens is that, as evidence mounts, you recognize the signs of an approaching killer; the disadvantage is you become a Cassandra whose vision of the future convinces no one, not even those who support you. And Jade wonders, is it a later slasher stemming from human evil, like Ghostface from Scream, or a Golden Age slasher, a Jason, Freddie or Michael Myers, a supernatural machine of vengeance? Whichever, Jade’s convinced it will present as Stacey Graves, and she wavers between anticipation and trepidation.
My Heart is a Chainsaw (Indian Lake Trilogy, #1) is a gory, scary coming-of-age novel and not just for Jade but for Letha Mondragon, new to Proofrock and living with her father and stepmom in Terra Nova, on the developing opposite shore of the lake. Jade recognizes in Letha all the signs of a pristine heroine, the final girl who is ultimately the only solution to a slasher. Told from Jade’s self-deprecatory perspective as she plans Letha’s instruction in slasher conventions, My Heart is a Chainsaw is often funny as her plans take odd and somewhat incoherent form, and sometimes heart-breaking, and often chilling.
If you’re not a slasher fan (me, neither, with exceptions) this may sound off-putting, but Graham Jones defines his terms and situates the action of the novel within the context of the movies, offering insight into what makes the movies appealing to some, as well as on their more problematic aspects, all woven together so thoroughly there’s little issue with following the story. And as the story progresses and we piece together both Proofrock’s and Jade’s past, we see she’s like most teens, alternately self-aware and self-deceiving, open and secretive, anxious to join in something bigger than she’s ever been part of, and afraid of the consequences of that something, fearful that her wish has brought down hell on Proofrock.
Anyone who hasn’t read Graham Jones and considering reading a horror novel should consider one of his. And I’ll bet that if you choose this one, like me immediately after finishing you’ll begin Don’t Fear the Reaper, the second book in the Indian Lake Trilogy.
MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW by Stephen Graham Jones
(Indian Lake Trilogy #1)
405 pages, Hardcover
First published August 31, 2021, Saga Press
Review by Randy Money
