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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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