My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #1)
Stephen Graham Jones
You won’t find a more hardcore eighties-slasher-film fan than high school senior Jade Daniels. And you won’t find a place less supportive of girls who wear torn T-shirts and too much eyeliner than Proofrock, nestled eight thousand feet up a mountain in Idaho, alongside Indian Lake, home to both Camp Blood – site of a massacre fifty years ago – and, as of this summer, Terra Nova, a second-home celebrity Camelot being carved out of a national forest. That’s not the only thing that’s getting carved up, though – this, Jade knows, is the start of a slasher. But what kind? Who’s wearing the mask? Jade’s got an encyclopedic recall of every horror movie on the shelf, but… will that help her survive? Can she get a final girl trained enough to stop all this from happening? Does she even want to? Isn’t a slasher exactly what her hometown deserves? This new novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones, called “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange, explores the changing landscape of the West through his distinct voice of sharp humor and prophetic violence. Go up the mountain to Proofrock. See if you’ve got what it takes – see if your heart, too, might be a chainsaw.
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0My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones is a retelling of The Boy Who Cried Wolf but this time it is The Girl Who Cried Slasher. This book is a huge homage to the Slasher movie genre and the final survival girl filled with history, facts, and opinions. Where Slasher movies are not known for their characterizations this novel is all about character; as it breakdowns the many layers of the main character Jade. Jade at first is seen as a Slasher obsessed troublemaker, rebelling from society, at the end of the story Jade is explained and grows and it is a truly beautiful thing. I was fortunate enough to get an arc of this book and sadly was not able to read it before publication so I decided to support the author by buying a copy on audible. While I liked to listen to this story because I love horror even with listening I found it hard to follow and needed to sometimes restart chapters because I felt as though I was lost. While I enjoyed was the layers that were revealed of Jade and the bits and pieces about slashers. What I disliked was that Jade was never believed and struggled to get her point across, I know that this sounds like a very uneven review but I did like the spooky aspect and would read more from this author in the future.
0**I was provided with an electronic ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**
Stephen Graham Jones returns with his newest homage to slasher films in My Heart Is a Chainsaw. Jade is the horror chick in her senior year in her small town. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of slashers through the years. Which makes Jade the resident expert who can identify when the slasher cycle begins in her town.
This novel is every bit an ode to horror, an ode to the slasher, and also manages to push beyond that and make it deeper. I am able to recognize all that it accomplished in those areas, and still recognize that I was left feeling lukewarm. The opening scene was pretty good. Then stagnant.
I wanted to DNF at many points, but that feeling came through strong at 40%. This was the slowest of slow burns, and I even looked up other reviews which encouraged me to hang in there until 60%. Well, things picked up at 67% and from there the slasher I had hoped for set in. From there to the end, the action was pretty non-stop and had constant twists and turns and the bloodbath commenced. However, I have to acknowledge not really having a great time for basically two-thirds of the book. Perhaps if I was more of a horror buff (beyond being able to recognize the references and actually entering the point of being excited by their presence), I might not have found the pace to be so slow. The ending did bump this up from a 2.5 to a 3 without any qualms from me. The ending was absolutely solid.
While this wasn't my favorite of Stephen Graham Jones' works (which is The Only Good Indians), I have no hesitation in picking up more of his work in the future.
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