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My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
Deep breath: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
This book is excellent horror, and I may need some recovery time to repair my shattered nerves. Jesus Christ on a waterski.
This author has kinda been on my horror radar in the same way Joe Hill's stuff was (which I also ended up liking when I got around to reading it), but I've never read anything else by him. After finding the opening of the book a bit hard to get into, I was absolutely riveted once it got rolling. I had a few logistical and plot issues eventually, but on the whole I really loved it a lot.
I went into the book with very little idea of what to expect and I liked reading it that way, but it is definitely intense.
There's a horror-typical but very nicely done slasher-y prologue in which two young adults swimming in the town lake come to regret this, and then the book swings into the POV of the main protagonist, a suicidal and self-destructive teenager. If you don't bounce off her first viewpoint chapter (in which her deadbeat dad's drunk friend jokes about raping her and she runs away, graphically tries to commit suicide and is institutionalized) you won't bounce off the rest of the book - that's actually about as dark as it gets, although it's not the only time it gets that dark in that particular way - but I very nearly did just because I wasn't expecting things to go real-world-dark that quickly.
Once I got into her viewpoint, Jade is a terrific protagonist. She's a 17-year-old half-Blackfeet teenager with a horribly messed-up home life, bleak and funny and clearly carrying a tremendous amount of unhappiness and anger around with her. Jade is a horror fan who sees everything through the lens of the slasher movie that she wishes would happen in her small-town hometown, and when people actually *do* start dying, she is convinced that she's the only person who has the key to what's happening because of the slasher plots she's memorized over the years.
Probably the biggest logistical hurdle I had here is that I'm not convinced a 17-year-old would be this certain that life follows movie-plot logic. Seeking meaning and patterns in her chaotic and unhappy life, Jade treats slasher films almost like a religion; once she becomes convinced that a real-life slasher movie is unfolding in her hometown, she believes that real-life events are going to hit every plot beat, including the presence of a Final Girl, the killer being dramatically unmasked at the final big massacre (and not before), etc. The book itself is a slasher movie homage without being coyly tongue-in-cheek about it; everyone around Jade is living according to real-life rules, while Jade is definitely trying to make real-life events fit her fictional narrative, and also doesn't actually see a lot of what's going on, as she's rather realistically sidelined for some of the main action (but convinced this is part of the plot, as she sees herself as a peripheral character/victim rather than a protagonist).
The highlight of the book for me were Jade's school term papers, interspersed with the main action, all of which she blatantly ties back to slasher films and all of which are a) hilarious, and b) sound exactly like the writing voice of a bright but slackerish teenager.
Everything else I have to say about the book is a potentially book-ruining spoiler. I suggest not reading the following if you plan to read the book and like surprises.
Book-ruining spoilers!
First of all, there is a supernatural, not human, cause of the murders at the lake, which is absolutely chilling but also doesn't really get the horror buildup it deserves because of Jade's utter conviction that it's a human killer right up until the final massacre (which she predicts, but doesn't happen anywhere near the way she thinks it will). Therefore, you never really get the "creature stalks people" aspect or really any of the supernatural spine-tingling horror that you would normally get in a book like this except at the very beginning and the very end. (To be fair, the scene in which we get a full-on look at what's actually doing the murders is high-octane nightmare fuel.)
I'm conflicted about this, because Jade's mixed-up POV on what's actually happening and unreliable-narrator-ness is really entertaining (if a little logistically hard to swallow in places) and is the bedrock of the book's theme - both the slasher homage aspects and the fact that she copes with her horrible life through fantasy, only to eventually have it stripped away. But I almost felt a little let down that something this terrifying spent most of the book being primarily hinted at rather than getting to have its ultra-creepy moment in the ... er, dark, as it's sunlight-averse.
I also ended the book feeling like some fairly large tracts of plot were never actually explained, due to Jade missing or misinterpreting a lot of the key action. The monster is restricted to the lake - except when it's not, and can't operate in daylight, except when it does. There are early hints that some aspect of what's going on involves people around the lake being mentally warped into monsters themselves, and there are definitely some parts of the plot that are really only explainable that way - but the final explanation doesn't actually explain it, unless there's more to it than Jade knows, but since the book ends there, we (and she) don't know either.
This complaining out of the way, though, I absolutely loved everything else. There's a cast of flawed, believable, likable characters (with one exception, for me; see below). The buildup to the non-monster-related big reveal about Jade's life and her issues is fantastically well done and more horrifying in retrospect than any of the actual horror. Her relationships with the other adults in her life, which she is a gigantic unreliable narrator about, are also really well handled; I love how clearly you can distinguish, at times, between Jade's bleak, cynical viewpoint and what is *actually* going on with, e.g. the teacher she tries to act indifferent towards but clearly idolizes.
The exception I had a little trouble with is Letha, Jade's sort-of love interest and pick for Final Girl. The thing with Letha is that Jade immediately latches onto her as Better Than Anyone Else and therefore the one person who's going to survive and win, and she's frustratingly right about most of this. Letha is rich but incredibly nice; she's coordinated and athletic and above all, lucky; things just work out for her. Contrasted against the rest of the flawed, struggling characters in this book, this makes her incredibly hard to like. Jade alternates between loving her and feeling betrayed by her whenever Letha fails to act as Jade thinks a horror movie protagonist should; meanwhile, I kept wanting her to lose, or display some flaws, and being relieved in the rare instances when she did. Letha really does feel like she walked into the book from a movie, which is how Jade sees her but also is a bit hard to take.
But she's also a bit meta, as the book in general is, and I did feel that (mostly) the blend of meta/genre-savvy elements combined with real-world, down-to-earth details and characters worked much better than most instances of this that I've run across in fiction. It's not a hard book to believe in, even if the plot does generally track with Jade's mental slasher plot architecture much better than it really has any right to.
And Jade's own arc, from furiously looking forward to living in a slasher movie because she daydreams about painting the town's walls with the blood of everyone she knows, to tearful, terrified courage as she actually tries to save them (and takes on her own personal monster), is really fantastic. The engine that really drives the book is that all of Jade's fury, all of her depression and misery, all of her obsession with seeing the world as a meaningful place where the plot conforms to a coherent arc and everything that happens to anyone is exactly what they deserve - all stems from one significant (horrific) event in her childhood. Strikingly, the book actually flat-out tells you the reason halfway through (and the clues are planted everywhere); it just tells you in a way that makes you realize something obviously did happen but simultaneously believe that what it's telling you (the actual truth) is a lie covering for something different and possibly worse.
About halfway through the book, Jade's attempts to "train" Letha for her role as a Final Girl go disastrously wrong when Letha tells the adults everything, and the handful of people who are genuinely concerned about Jade - one of her teachers and the town sheriff, as well as Letha - stage an intervention to try to get Letha to admit that all of this, the horror movie obsession, is a cry for help. Jade opened up to Letha in a letter in which she described how she found her first horror movie in a convenience store bargain bin, and Letha combed it for clues to Jade's psychological issues and then confronts her, along with the two adults, with a laundry list of reasons why she thinks that Jade's horror movie obsession is a coded cry for help because her dad raped her as a small child, and Jade needs to admit to it and get help. Jade is shocked, baffled, and betrayed; she insists that this is just *her*, there's no secret rape that explains everything about her life, people don't work like that, while everyone else tries to browbeat her into admitting it.
So this plants the seed that something obviously happened to her, because all Jade's flashbacks to her early childhood years suggest that she was a happy, well-adjusted child until Things Went Wrong (somehow) in her teens.
But it's not until the final pages that Jade finally admits - to the reader and herself - that they were exactly right. Her dad did rape her, and all her fantasies about the town turning into a slasher movie are because slasher movies are about revenge, and because a serial killer spree can be used for cover for an unrelated murder, and what she really wants to do is kill her dad. Which, after the last people she truly cared about die in the massacre, she does actually, finally manage to do.
There are dozens upon dozens of (horrifying) clues to this scattered throughout, from Jade's insistence that she can't be a Final Girl because Final Girls are virginal and pure, to her obsession with the revenge aspects of slasher movies but (as one of the characters points out) the one genre she refuses to talk about is rape revenge. And yet it's all obfuscated in such a way that while I did wonder at various points in the book whether it was true, it isn't at all obvious or clear that it is true until that final, perfectly timed reveal in which she finally tells the truth to a dying friend and then sets out to do something about it.
In the end, Jade saves herself and saves the town, but is caught on video killing her dad and runs away again. Still, the tone of the book really isn't bleak. It's a book with a lot of heart and a lot of sympathy for all of its characters (well, except the child molesters, but I'm fine with that), and it's an unflinchingly political book that never goes for the low-hanging fruit of easy answers and clear-cut Good Guys and Bad Guys whose fate can be read in their first appearance. A lot of this book surprised me in the best way, especially how much humor it has, and how many of the adults around Jade turned out to genuinely care about her and want to help her. (And in the end, some of them did, if not how she would have wanted.) There's a sequel coming out in February and I'm currently feeling like I need a good long rest after finishing this one before I tackle another book in this series - but I definitely want to find out where Jade goes from here.
This book is excellent horror, and I may need some recovery time to repair my shattered nerves. Jesus Christ on a waterski.
This author has kinda been on my horror radar in the same way Joe Hill's stuff was (which I also ended up liking when I got around to reading it), but I've never read anything else by him. After finding the opening of the book a bit hard to get into, I was absolutely riveted once it got rolling. I had a few logistical and plot issues eventually, but on the whole I really loved it a lot.
I went into the book with very little idea of what to expect and I liked reading it that way, but it is definitely intense.
There's a horror-typical but very nicely done slasher-y prologue in which two young adults swimming in the town lake come to regret this, and then the book swings into the POV of the main protagonist, a suicidal and self-destructive teenager. If you don't bounce off her first viewpoint chapter (in which her deadbeat dad's drunk friend jokes about raping her and she runs away, graphically tries to commit suicide and is institutionalized) you won't bounce off the rest of the book - that's actually about as dark as it gets, although it's not the only time it gets that dark in that particular way - but I very nearly did just because I wasn't expecting things to go real-world-dark that quickly.
Once I got into her viewpoint, Jade is a terrific protagonist. She's a 17-year-old half-Blackfeet teenager with a horribly messed-up home life, bleak and funny and clearly carrying a tremendous amount of unhappiness and anger around with her. Jade is a horror fan who sees everything through the lens of the slasher movie that she wishes would happen in her small-town hometown, and when people actually *do* start dying, she is convinced that she's the only person who has the key to what's happening because of the slasher plots she's memorized over the years.
Probably the biggest logistical hurdle I had here is that I'm not convinced a 17-year-old would be this certain that life follows movie-plot logic. Seeking meaning and patterns in her chaotic and unhappy life, Jade treats slasher films almost like a religion; once she becomes convinced that a real-life slasher movie is unfolding in her hometown, she believes that real-life events are going to hit every plot beat, including the presence of a Final Girl, the killer being dramatically unmasked at the final big massacre (and not before), etc. The book itself is a slasher movie homage without being coyly tongue-in-cheek about it; everyone around Jade is living according to real-life rules, while Jade is definitely trying to make real-life events fit her fictional narrative, and also doesn't actually see a lot of what's going on, as she's rather realistically sidelined for some of the main action (but convinced this is part of the plot, as she sees herself as a peripheral character/victim rather than a protagonist).
The highlight of the book for me were Jade's school term papers, interspersed with the main action, all of which she blatantly ties back to slasher films and all of which are a) hilarious, and b) sound exactly like the writing voice of a bright but slackerish teenager.
Everything else I have to say about the book is a potentially book-ruining spoiler. I suggest not reading the following if you plan to read the book and like surprises.
Book-ruining spoilers!
First of all, there is a supernatural, not human, cause of the murders at the lake, which is absolutely chilling but also doesn't really get the horror buildup it deserves because of Jade's utter conviction that it's a human killer right up until the final massacre (which she predicts, but doesn't happen anywhere near the way she thinks it will). Therefore, you never really get the "creature stalks people" aspect or really any of the supernatural spine-tingling horror that you would normally get in a book like this except at the very beginning and the very end. (To be fair, the scene in which we get a full-on look at what's actually doing the murders is high-octane nightmare fuel.)
I'm conflicted about this, because Jade's mixed-up POV on what's actually happening and unreliable-narrator-ness is really entertaining (if a little logistically hard to swallow in places) and is the bedrock of the book's theme - both the slasher homage aspects and the fact that she copes with her horrible life through fantasy, only to eventually have it stripped away. But I almost felt a little let down that something this terrifying spent most of the book being primarily hinted at rather than getting to have its ultra-creepy moment in the ... er, dark, as it's sunlight-averse.
I also ended the book feeling like some fairly large tracts of plot were never actually explained, due to Jade missing or misinterpreting a lot of the key action. The monster is restricted to the lake - except when it's not, and can't operate in daylight, except when it does. There are early hints that some aspect of what's going on involves people around the lake being mentally warped into monsters themselves, and there are definitely some parts of the plot that are really only explainable that way - but the final explanation doesn't actually explain it, unless there's more to it than Jade knows, but since the book ends there, we (and she) don't know either.
This complaining out of the way, though, I absolutely loved everything else. There's a cast of flawed, believable, likable characters (with one exception, for me; see below). The buildup to the non-monster-related big reveal about Jade's life and her issues is fantastically well done and more horrifying in retrospect than any of the actual horror. Her relationships with the other adults in her life, which she is a gigantic unreliable narrator about, are also really well handled; I love how clearly you can distinguish, at times, between Jade's bleak, cynical viewpoint and what is *actually* going on with, e.g. the teacher she tries to act indifferent towards but clearly idolizes.
The exception I had a little trouble with is Letha, Jade's sort-of love interest and pick for Final Girl. The thing with Letha is that Jade immediately latches onto her as Better Than Anyone Else and therefore the one person who's going to survive and win, and she's frustratingly right about most of this. Letha is rich but incredibly nice; she's coordinated and athletic and above all, lucky; things just work out for her. Contrasted against the rest of the flawed, struggling characters in this book, this makes her incredibly hard to like. Jade alternates between loving her and feeling betrayed by her whenever Letha fails to act as Jade thinks a horror movie protagonist should; meanwhile, I kept wanting her to lose, or display some flaws, and being relieved in the rare instances when she did. Letha really does feel like she walked into the book from a movie, which is how Jade sees her but also is a bit hard to take.
But she's also a bit meta, as the book in general is, and I did feel that (mostly) the blend of meta/genre-savvy elements combined with real-world, down-to-earth details and characters worked much better than most instances of this that I've run across in fiction. It's not a hard book to believe in, even if the plot does generally track with Jade's mental slasher plot architecture much better than it really has any right to.
And Jade's own arc, from furiously looking forward to living in a slasher movie because she daydreams about painting the town's walls with the blood of everyone she knows, to tearful, terrified courage as she actually tries to save them (and takes on her own personal monster), is really fantastic. The engine that really drives the book is that all of Jade's fury, all of her depression and misery, all of her obsession with seeing the world as a meaningful place where the plot conforms to a coherent arc and everything that happens to anyone is exactly what they deserve - all stems from one significant (horrific) event in her childhood. Strikingly, the book actually flat-out tells you the reason halfway through (and the clues are planted everywhere); it just tells you in a way that makes you realize something obviously did happen but simultaneously believe that what it's telling you (the actual truth) is a lie covering for something different and possibly worse.
About halfway through the book, Jade's attempts to "train" Letha for her role as a Final Girl go disastrously wrong when Letha tells the adults everything, and the handful of people who are genuinely concerned about Jade - one of her teachers and the town sheriff, as well as Letha - stage an intervention to try to get Letha to admit that all of this, the horror movie obsession, is a cry for help. Jade opened up to Letha in a letter in which she described how she found her first horror movie in a convenience store bargain bin, and Letha combed it for clues to Jade's psychological issues and then confronts her, along with the two adults, with a laundry list of reasons why she thinks that Jade's horror movie obsession is a coded cry for help because her dad raped her as a small child, and Jade needs to admit to it and get help. Jade is shocked, baffled, and betrayed; she insists that this is just *her*, there's no secret rape that explains everything about her life, people don't work like that, while everyone else tries to browbeat her into admitting it.
So this plants the seed that something obviously happened to her, because all Jade's flashbacks to her early childhood years suggest that she was a happy, well-adjusted child until Things Went Wrong (somehow) in her teens.
But it's not until the final pages that Jade finally admits - to the reader and herself - that they were exactly right. Her dad did rape her, and all her fantasies about the town turning into a slasher movie are because slasher movies are about revenge, and because a serial killer spree can be used for cover for an unrelated murder, and what she really wants to do is kill her dad. Which, after the last people she truly cared about die in the massacre, she does actually, finally manage to do.
There are dozens upon dozens of (horrifying) clues to this scattered throughout, from Jade's insistence that she can't be a Final Girl because Final Girls are virginal and pure, to her obsession with the revenge aspects of slasher movies but (as one of the characters points out) the one genre she refuses to talk about is rape revenge. And yet it's all obfuscated in such a way that while I did wonder at various points in the book whether it was true, it isn't at all obvious or clear that it is true until that final, perfectly timed reveal in which she finally tells the truth to a dying friend and then sets out to do something about it.
In the end, Jade saves herself and saves the town, but is caught on video killing her dad and runs away again. Still, the tone of the book really isn't bleak. It's a book with a lot of heart and a lot of sympathy for all of its characters (well, except the child molesters, but I'm fine with that), and it's an unflinchingly political book that never goes for the low-hanging fruit of easy answers and clear-cut Good Guys and Bad Guys whose fate can be read in their first appearance. A lot of this book surprised me in the best way, especially how much humor it has, and how many of the adults around Jade turned out to genuinely care about her and want to help her. (And in the end, some of them did, if not how she would have wanted.) There's a sequel coming out in February and I'm currently feeling like I need a good long rest after finishing this one before I tackle another book in this series - but I definitely want to find out where Jade goes from here.
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I also thought Letha was too good to be true, but we're seeing her through Jade's unreliable POV. I think we needed to get a bit of other people’s perspective on her, the way we do with other characters that Jade is projecting on.
The Only Good Indians is what Jones does with supernatural front and center, and it's fantastic.
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So maybe I'm missing something really obvious with the entire nailgun/construction worker massacre/dead elk sequence. But even in retrospect I can't figure it out - did Theo really kill the construction workers and build a dead elk maze, and if it wasn't him, what was happening? Why was Letha so evasive when Jade asked her how she got out of the elk pile? So much of the rest of it fits together elegantly - especially all the foreshadowing about Jade's dad; the entire book is absolutely FULL of clues now that I'm looking for them, from the revenge focus of Jade's first slasher paper to all her fantasies about killing her dad specifically, and the reason why she focuses so heavily on Theo as the killer and wanting to protect Letha from him.
The Only Good Indians is what Jones does with supernatural front and center, and it's fantastic.
I definitely need to read that next! I feel like this book really couldn't have leaned into the supernatural horror much harder than it does, with Jade being so wrong for most of the book about what's happening. But it's just such a gloriously horrifying image (the jawless little girl scampering about on the surface of the lake! The patter of little feet as the last thing you hear when she comes up behind you!) and I would like to see what he does when he really pushes the buildup for that, rather than having her offstage for 90% of the book.
Anyway, though, I did feel like Jade's absolute fixation on slasher movies as her frame story for her life worked better for me once I'd had some time to think about it. I still feel like it went a little too far towards Jade genuinely believing in the reality of some tropes more than I would expect for someone her age, but it's also pretty clear *why* she wants to believe that everything makes sense and why it matters to her so much that people in slasher movies die for a reason.
And I ended up being incredibly touched by Jade's relationship with her teacher; he was such a wonderful weirdo and his death was by far the worst gut-punch in the book. Her interactions with the sheriff were also great - I love how obvious it was that they were both trying to help her, while Jade herself was in absolute denial about either that or the fact that she cared about them at all. (I'm about 50% sure that he isn't dead, considering how often characters turn out *not* to be dead if we didn't actually see them dead and floating.)
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I think he must have been a murderer independently of Stacey Graves. Jade's theory on motives sounded pretty plausible: he shot down Mr. Holmes in the ultralight, the construction workers witnessed it, he killed them to cover it up, and he stashed the corpses in the maze ("Is a construction worker in that elk?") to get rid of them.
I'm not sure exactly what was going on with Letha and the elk pile, but I lean toward thinking that she wasn't really being evasive, she was just understandably flustered.
the jawless little girl scampering about on the surface of the lake!
Terrifying. There was something so unsettling and unnatural about her being unable to get beneath the surface rather than having the power to walk on water.
I also loved her teacher. His death was SO SAD.
The Only Good Indians, interestingly, also involves elk. I thought the supernatural elements were really well-done, and there's scenes that are absolutely terrifying.
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Terrifying. There was something so unsettling and unnatural about her being unable to get beneath the surface rather than having the power to walk on water.
So superbly creepy.
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But it's still an absolutely BANANAS reaction! For someone in his position, especially - I would expect someone like Theo (rich, lucky, things just work out for him) to hire a lawyer, dump a fat wad of bribes on the witnesses (like he already did with Greyson's situation, assuming that's all true) and just assume that things will work out for him because he has the money to make it go away. As opposed to "Grab a nailgun and go on a murder spree" ... with his wife, daughter, and all his friends RIGHT THERE on a boat tied up adjacent to the murder spree location! It really only makes sense if he's been a little warped by Stacey Graves already (which Greyson also appears to have been) ... but nothing else in the book really makes it seem like she can do this. It's such a weird loose end. I may have to reread that part to try to figure it out.
That was a good catch (below) on Theo having seen Stacey and mistaking Jade for her, though! Leaving aside the construction worker situation, Theo seeing Jade run off with his daughter, thinking she's Stacey, and coming after both of them in a misguided attempt to rescue Letha does actually make sense.
I did wonder if the nailgun murder spree was actually a misguided attempt to kill Stacey - if he was trying to shoot HER and the guys got in the way - but it doesn't really fit with everything else, especially all of this happening in daylight. Also, the dead elk maze is bonkers no matter what.
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Also, the dead elk maze is bonkers no matter what.
Truly, words to live by.
I wonder if maybe Stacey particularly targeted Theo Mondragon for corruption/influence because he was sort of the unofficial leader of Terra Nova and therefore representative of everything that was currently angering her the most?
Side-note: those poor Dutch kids! They had no way of knowing what they were getting into!
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Yeah, Clate's death is actually a perfect thematic fit for the rest of the book, while Theo's murder spree is just kind of ... there, like it needed one more rewrite to make it click into place. (Also, this makes me realize that with everything else going on, I completely forgot that Letha saw a guy diced into pieces in her boat propeller! How is she still so normal after all of this? I think that's part of what makes her feel more like a movie character than a real person, unlike everyone else.)
I wonder if maybe Stacey particularly targeted Theo Mondragon for corruption/influence because he was sort of the unofficial leader of Terra Nova and therefore representative of everything that was currently angering her the most?
I could definitely see this, but I could see it more if we'd seen Stacey otherwise being able to influence people directly. (She *does* seem to have done something to Greyson, but it's also possible he just lost his mind from being stuck in a cursed hole with a jawless dead girl.) I had assumed early on that some kind of murder contagion was what was happening, but all of that turned out to be attributable to other causes ... except for Theo.
It does make me wonder if there's more explanation for the less well explained parts of this book coming up in the sequel. It's possible some of the mysteries were never explained because they're going to be later.
I also just realized that "Shooting Glasses" apparently spent an entire day hiding out in Terra Nova, possibly in the LAKE, with his back full of nails without ever managing to slip away and go for help, which also doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially since we now know that he can swim across the entire lake carrying two kids. Why didn't he just swim across in the daytime and report Theo for murder?
Side-note: those poor Dutch kids! They had no way of knowing what they were getting into!
Boy, did those kids pick the wrong lake to swim in.
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I would really not be surprised if everything with Letha turns out to be super-relevant in the other books, because she sees so much and then is in the really weird position of getting credit for something she knows she didn't do--I can see her characterization getting a lot more complex in future installments.
I also just realized that "Shooting Glasses" apparently spent an entire day hiding out in Terra Nova, possibly in the LAKE, with his back full of nails without ever managing to slip away and go for help, which also doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially since we now know that he can swim across the entire lake carrying two kids. Why didn't he just swim across in the daytime and report Theo for murder?
Also extremely valid. Although as little sense as that overarching situation makes, I'll admit to laughing when Jade tries to call out to him and can only call him Shooting Glasses because she never got his actual name ... and doesn't even know if he would even associate his glasses with shooting.
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I did love that!
Imagine this book from the POV of this random construction worker who first of all watched his co-worker fall into a cursed hole under the foundations of the subdivision he's trying to build, then had a stray teenage runaway turn up on the construction site and try to kill herself in front of him, then watched his entire crew murdered by their employer with a nailgun, then hid under the dock (or somewhere) right next to a yacht full of rich people who were getting massacred, and THEN swam for help right into the middle of another bloodbath!
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LOLOLOLOLOL. But no, I think she whammied him - he was crawling around on all fours immediately and then for the rest of his life, which seems a little extreme even under the circumstances. So, maybe the combination of living on a cursed foundation and actually seeing Stacey did whammy Theo into a nailgun murderer.
Re: Shooting Glasses: I'm going to handwave that one as that's how long it took him to rest and build up his strength after getting shot in the back. Presumably he and the girls were having their own little survival h/c story going on offpage.
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The best I can think of is that, like you said, there's an aspect of people also being warped into monsters (see also: Greyson Brust), so maybe Stacey Graves influenced in some way? I think he'd been seeing her, just like Letha had, because I think when he reacts really strongly to seeing Jade--"You!"--it's because she's got the long dark hair then and he's maybe mistaking her for Stacey?
Letha is definitely a little too perfect, especially with her just taking Jade's trespassing completely in stride and inviting her to stay over--at this point she'd have every reason to believe Jade is stalking her! (Which Jade sort of is.) I think she's probably meant as a fake-out for us as well as for Jade, like she's so obviously a perfect Final Girl character that we maybe put more stock into Jade's idea that what's happening is following those rules, but it's not that satisfying.
The book as a whole, though, really is. I loved everything with Jade interacting with Sheriff Hardy and Mr. Holmes, and I just kind of want to build an AU happy ending of my own where Hardy and Holmes adopt her and she splits her time between their houses. Jones is incredibly good at supernatural horror--I also enthusiastically recommend The Only Good Indians--and that really shines in the last third of this. That climactic scene on the lake is just non-stop jaw-dropping (with apologies to Stacey Graves) and awe-inspiring.
I thought Jade's past trauma was also handled really well--I love the way Letha picking up on the subtext in her paper comes as a kind of twist that Jade isn't ready to acknowledge--and I have All the Emotions about Jade seeing the mother bear protecting her cub at the end. MY HEART.
I know a sequel to this is coming out soon, and I'm very curious where it will go.
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I agree, Theo killing the construction workers doesn't make a ton of sense no matter how I squint at it - there's no indication otherwise that Stacey Graves warps people's minds, and it's kind weird if he decided murder was a better choice than the bribery that had worked before.
I also want that AU happy ending. I love Jade so much (the insane horror pranks she mentions in her essays!), and Hardy and Holmes too. I also loved the ending with the mother bear.
So, I peeked a bit and it's a TRILOGY! Very curious about this.
Did you guys read the acknowledgments at the end of the book? They're almost an essay on the writing of it, and it's really worth reading.
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Yes! It's a really rich, interesting, moving essay. Like the foreword for Night Shift, I think it should definitely be considered part of the book-reading experience.
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Ohhhhhh, I want that AU so badly! ;__; Her relationships with both of them, including her denial of how much it really mattered to her until it was too late, was so well done.
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Also I saw someone say that Jade and Letha were "probably shippier than the author intended" and I think that is absolutely untrue. He totally intended it. That first time they meet is one of the horniest passages I've ever read in my life. Jade even has a line at the end of a long passage rhapsodizing about Letha where she mentally promises Mr. Holmes that she hasn't fallen in love with Terra Nova - only with part of it.
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You mentioning the book the other day made me realize the sequel is actually out now, but I haven't gotten to it yet. I think I've sufficiently recovered from this book at this point to be able to read it, but oh my god.
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... I was slightly disappointed that more advantage wasn't taken earlier of the sheer nightmare fuel creepy factor of the deranged jawless little girl scampering up behind people on the lake and ripping their faces off, though. Possibly the sequel will go harder on the supernatural horror now that Jade knows it's real.
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I was convinced for a while that it had to be a dream or hallucination or fantasy
Same!!! So much of the second half is so bonkers that "it was all a dream" just made way sense than what was apparently actually happening. What. What!!
I peeked at the Amazon summary of the sequel, and it doesn't sound supernatural at all. I guess it could be, like this one eventually was! But like you, I think I need to breathe for a bit before I tackle that next one.
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exploding flesh fountain
jawless little girl
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