CEO Reads: My Heart is a Chainsaw

This novel is a love letter to slasher films, written by an obvious devotee of the genre. I am not a lover of horror films but I totally recommend Stephan Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw to you so you can meet Jade Daniels, a 17 year old misfit. Jade dyes her hair with shoe polish and food colouring, dresses in overalls and combat boots, is a loner and frames every event in her life through the rules of her favourite genre – the slasher film. Each chapter has a horror related title such as “Don’t Go Into the Woods” and includes one of Jade’s Slasher 101 reports submitted to her least hated teacher to try and get her final credits to pass high school. Jade is horror-obsessed with this obsession taking her out of her own life which is full of trauma and abandonment which is slowly revealed throughout the horror being played out in the rural town of Proofrock, Idaho.  First we have a couple of young tourists go missing at the same time as a group of wealthy families, the Founders, develop their own community across the lake for their Terra Nova Housing project. Enter stage left “the final girl”, the horror trope saviour, Letha Mondragon. Jade immediately identifies her as the final girl and as someone she should protect and induct into the horror plot playing out around them so Letha can survive.

The town does have some gruesome past crimes that fuel Jade’s horror fantasies and when more bizarre deaths targeting the wealthy residents of Terra Nova occur Jade tries to warn the town of what is coming – because the story will unfold like every slasher film Jade has ever seen and she cannot be the final girl to save the town as she is not the “right kind of girl”. Jade is a fascinating character and Jones has written an incredibly different genre bending novel to showcase her and her situation. As he mercilessly outlines the ways the parents, the school and the community has failed to care for Jade he does provide us with a powerful sense of the care that adults owe the children they interact with and how we should be supporting young people to come of age. Jade is awkward and full of insecurities but is still obstinate in her belief that the town can be saved – if only they would listen to her, if only the final girl would believe her, so she tries and tries again. She is also funny and I would challenge any reader not to be on her side – despite the increasing body count, the increasing threat of violence and the increasing complexity of the slasher story tropes seeping into Jade’s real life. The ending will challenge you and I will not offer any spoilers but please, check out the book and meet Jade today. You will be challenged, captivated and at times exasperated by her but you will not be disappointed.

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Also available in Large Print