My Heart is a Chainsaw by stephen Graham Jones

A Fascinating Anti-Hero

Jennifer “Jade” Daniels is an indigenous 17-year-old outcast living in the desolate small town of Proofrock, Idaho. She has no friends and, other than her pathetic drunk father, no family.

What she does have are slasher movies. Jade is obsessed with them. If there was a scholarship for slasher movie knowledge, Jade would win it hands down. After people begin to drop dead, Jade believes (and even hopes) that a real-life slasher has infiltrated her boring town. The police and her teachers think that she’s crazy, but Jade knows the truth.

Jade is one of the most unique fictional characters I have encountered. She has deep-seated mental and emotional problems and rarely does or says the right thing. But she’s still likeable and easy to root for.

She’s a kid who’s had a brutally tough life and has received little, if any, help from adults or her peers. Jade uses slashers as a coping mechanism. They’re her escape from the emptiness and sadness of her life.

My Heart is a Chainsaw is written by Stephen Graham Jones who, like Jade, is a member of the Blackfoot tribe. He opens the novel with the murders of a Dutch couple who are visiting Proofrock. Why someone would want to travel thousands of miles to visit a small town in Idaho is anyone’s guess, but a mysterious killer ensures that their stay doesn’t last long.

The remaining chapters are all from Jade’s perspective. Although the novel is written in the third person, Jade is functionally the narrator of the story.

As a hardcore slasher fan, Jade knows that the only person who can defeat the killer is the final girl. Jade considers herself unworthy of this role, but she finds the perfect candidate in her new classmate, Letha Mondragon.

Letha is pretty, kindhearted, and morally pure, all attributes that were traditionally common for final girls in horror movies. Jade channels her obsessive (and possibly romantic) interest in Letha into convincing her new friend that a slasher is on the loose. Jade believes that she needs to train Letha to be the final girl that Proofrock needs.

It would have been easy for Stephen Graham Jones to make Letha a stuck-up snob, but he resists going this route. Letha understandably thinks that Jade has a few screws loose, but she treats the troubled girl with respect and empathy.

Letha is tough, courageous, and a genuinely good person. She knows nothing about slashers or final girls, but Letha realizes that Jade is right: a maniacal killer is stalking Proofrock. She and Jade might be the only people who can do anything about it.

A Dense and Difficult Read

After the prologue, the rest of the novel is a frenetic rollercoaster ride through Jade’s tortured, drug-addled mind. Her train of thought is a runaway locomotive. Jones fills the novel with rambling run-on sentences to emphasize Jade’s unsettled mindset. This is an interesting literary technique, but it makes the novel a challenging read.

What’s even more frustrating is Jade’s excruciating inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. For example, the novel has multiple instances when Jade thinks that she sees someone die, only for it to be revealed later that the person is still alive. As readers, we’re trying to piece together what is “really” happening, since Jade is incapable of telling us.

Many works of horror fiction have used an unreliable narrator, but I have rarely seen it taken to this extreme. The closest comparison is Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Jade isn’t a psycho, but she has major issues with being unable to decipher objective reality.

The novel is chock-full of often oblique references to slasher movies, including allusions to obscure titles like Just Before Dawn and Curtains. I enjoyed this, but people who don’t watch horror movies will have no idea what the hell Jade is talking about.

I was impressed by the amount of research that Jones did for this novel. The depth of Jade’s knowledge is truly remarkable.

My Heart is a Chainsaw culminates with a Fourth of July bloodbath where, after numerous detours and false revelations, the true identity of the killer is revealed. Jade and Letha are in the midst of a chaotic scene of bloody mayhem as they try to defeat the terrifying fiend and save what little is left of the town.

Hard-Hitting Themes

The gentrification of indigenous lands is one of the novel’s central themes. A group of newcomers headed by Theo Mondragon, Letha’s wealthy father, are developing a fancy housing project across the lake from Proofrock. Theo and his country club buddies think that they’ve found a vacation home paradise, but their disruption triggers dark forces that they are unprepared to face.

Near the end of the novel, Jones explores the idea that societies often have narrow views of who deserves to be a hero. Even if someone is heroic and brave, societies are reluctant to give them credit unless they meet a certain prototype.

There are numerous historical cases of people whose contributions were dismissed (at least initially) because they were the “wrong” type of person: wrong gender, wrong race, wrong sexual orientation, wrong social class, etc.

They didn’t fit the ideal image that their societies had created, so credit was taken away from them and given to someone more palatable. This searing injustice is portrayed near the end of the story.

Final Thoughts

My Heart is a Chainsaw is a good novel that comes achingly close to greatness. It features a compelling protagonist and some fantastic ideas.

I wish that Jones had alternated perspectives between the girls instead of burdening Jade, a traumatized teen who filters every experience through the lens of slasher movie tropes, with the entire narration.

Despite its flaws, I enjoyed the novel and I’m still thinking about it days after finishing it, which is one of the hallmarks of any good work of fiction.

My Heart is a Chainsaw was followed by a sequel, Don’t Fear the Reaper, which I reviewed here.

Rating: 7/10. Recommended for horror fans, but too confusing for people unfamiliar with the genre.