Review: My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Jade Daniels is an Indigenous slasher-obsessed senior in high school trying to survive in her small Idaho town. She’s got a loser dad, a dirty job, and she just might not graduate after all. A moneyed housing development is being built across the lake, right next to the now defunct Camp Blood. The lake is full of legends and fifty years earlier there was a massacre at the camp and Jade can’t help but think this is all a pretty good set-up for her very own slasher movie. Has Jade been watching too many movies or is there a killer on the loose?

Let me just say that any book that makes reference to My Bloody Valentine (the movie, not the band) and the 1986 Marc Price vehicle Trick or Treat at the outset knows who its audience is. There were 150 horror movies referenced that I found with another few nods to movies like The Breakfast Club and Grease peppered in along the way. There’s a lot of fan service here and that’s ok – if you are the kind of reader that sees themself in Jade. I don’t know how it will play to a more casual horror fan.

The re-read value is high either way – one time through for the clever plot and delightful protagonist and at least one more time to take note of all the movies that run from slasher classics and introductions to “holy shit dude, no one remembers 1981’s Night School.” I’ve seen more than one Twitter user say they felt like My Heart is a Chainsaw was written specifically for them and I think on some level, it was. Stephen Graham Jones has seen into my VHS collection and thus, into my heart.

Jade is an absolute delight and intensely relatable. She builds walls around herself with her outré (for Proofrock, Idaho) tastes even as she longs to be understood by someone – anyone. Throughout the novel, we get to read snippets of extra-credit assignments Jade has turned into her history teacher and one of her favorite adults if there is such a thing. Horror studies nerds will recognize her extra-credit as a Carol Clover-inspired treatise on “The Final Girl” and slasher rules/psychology.

Something much deeper lingers under the surface of this novel. It’s not just slasher movies and jump-scares, untrustworthy adults and rebellious teens. Without jumping into spoilers, one of the things I found most fascinating about My Heart is a Chainsaw is the way in which the novel is concerned with place and land and ownership vs. conservation vs. stewardship. An undercurrent of this novel feels to me like a commentary on (or asking us to question) the way our stories about place and the land we inhabit inform not just the way we relate to the land but also the way those stories inform our communities.

This was one hell of a fun ride. Satisfying, smart, and sure to hold a very special place on many a horror fan’s bookshelves.

4.5/5 you guessed it, chainsaws