Inverarity is not a Scottish village

A girl who has always wanted to live out her slasher movie dreams gets her wish.

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.

Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges…a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.

Jennifer "Jade" Daniels is "the horror girl," the weird kid who loves slasher movies and is always going on about them. Jade, as the first-person narrator of My Heart is a Chainsaw, is our tour guide through the history of slasher movies.



Much of this book is in the form of epistolary narratives, Jade writing "extra credit" assignments to her history teacher about the history of slashers and the subtle differences between a slasher flick and other horror genres, and in these letters Jade (and the author) is showing off an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre. Jade has seen everything. Not just all the Friday the 13th, Halloween, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but all the Jaws flicks (she makes a compelling argument for how Jaws is, in fact, a slasher movie), Bay of Blood, and freaking Leprechaun 6 (!!!).



Jade is also an angry, messed up kid. Half-Native American in the almost all-white town of Proofrock, Idaho. She resents her father for being a literal drunken Indian, but she resents him for a lot more than that, as it turns out. She resents her mother for being weak and useless, working in the Dollar Store and barely showing up for Jade. All angry teenage angst and goth black makeup, with an unhealthy obsession with horror movies, Jade is exactly who you'd expect to fantasize about a masked killer picking off the townspeople in a well-deserved bloodbath. But Jade really, really believes a bloodbath is coming. She doesn't want to be a Final Girl. She sees herself as a side character, an extra (and maybe, hopefully, a survivor).



Proofrock is a small town with a picturesque perfect-for-summer-camp-slaughter lake, and it even has an old haunted summer camp where supposedly there was a slaughter decades ago! If that wasn't enough, there are legends of a drowned Indian witch! There are also a bunch of mega-rich people moving into a community across the lake called "Terra Nova," bringing gentrification and class conflict. All the ingredients for a slasher movie. As Jade is constantly reminding us.



So for the first half of the book, Jade seems like an angry, somewhat delusional child, a teenager who's still just a little girl. A scared, angry little girl who is keeping some things buried deep, and her retreat into slasher movies is textbook coping mechanism. But the whole town is sick of her going on about how death is coming for them, which she expects because of course adults and police are always useless in slasher movies. When Jade makes friends with Letha Mondragon, the beautiful, sweet, too-good-to-be-true daughter of one of the rich Terra Novans, a billionaire with a brand new trophy wife barely older than Letha, Jade is convinced she has found her Final Girl, and that she has to get Letha ready. Letha, of course, takes an entirely different message from Jade's ravings about how she really needs to start carrying a machete and never run upstairs.



And then... things take a turn when people actually start dying. I'll admit I was kind of surprised when the book really did turn out to be a slasher story. It was teased for the entire book, but it was teased through the very bright but hyperimaginative first-person narrative of Jade, and I didn't think she was going to actually be right. I thought there would be a murder or two she'd have to solve, and that kind of happened, but then, oh my god, we've got ourselves an honest to god bloodbath and a real live slasher-killer.



Does Jade survive? Is she a Final Girl? Well, this is the first book in a trilogy, so... spoiler? But I thought the mysteries and the whodunnit parts were handled pretty well at first (Jade runs through suspects and motives, and all of them range from plausible to deranged, but start making more sense as people die). I must admit I wasn't super-sold on the climax and the killer, maybe because I kind of liked the doubt about Jade's sanity and whether any of this shit was real. But My Heart is a Chainsaw is a well-executed tale for anyone who's spent many hours in dark theaters watching people being stabbed, slashed, dismembered, hung, bent in half, set on fire, and thrown onto spiky fences.



If that's not your thing, you might still enjoy the book for Jade, but you will probably not appreciate all the shoutouts and bloody valentines to the genre.



Also by Stephen Graham Jones: My review of The Last Final Girl.

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My complete list of book reviews.