My Heart is a Chainsaw ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑
Genre: Horror
US Publication: August 13, 2021
Print: 416 pages
Audio: TBD
Confetti Rating: 5 stars
REVIEW:
Like people, there are books that give and books that take. My Heart is a Chainsaw is a book that takes an awful lot from its readers.
Patience.
Concentration.
An in-depth knowledge of slasher films and pop culture references.
Tolerance of extreme gore - animal (elk) and human.
The ability to sleep.
A bit of your soul.
I can honestly say I’ve never read a novel like this one. A half-Indian 17-year-old girl named Jade is so obsessed with slasher movies that she’s convinced the plot of one is emerging in real life in her small Idaho town. Is she delusional and just seeing things she wants to see, or is there really a violent killer on the loose?
After an intense opening chapter where very bad, very scary things happen to a young tourist couple from the Netherlands out on the town’s lake, the book downshifts and turns into the slowest of slow burns to acclimate readers to Jade’s life and mindset. Long expository third person chapters with long paragraphs and long sentences are punctuated with first person school papers Jade has written for history class, naturally all using her slasher-passion lens. Through these “Slasher 101” papers, we fill in our own gaps of horror movie knowledge and get foreshadowing of terrors to come.
While those terrors do eventually arrive, it’s not until about the 60% mark that gore-seekers will get their payoff. The last 40% of the book is a knockout. You’ll white knuckle your copy while grimacing… and gagging. (My Heart is a Chainsaw might as well come with a “gags guaranteed!” sticker on the cover.)
That black-and-white book cover design, with a slash going through it, feels very appropriate. This is a love-it-or-hate-it, no-gray-area read. There’s only a handful of people I’d recommend it to, but to those people I recommend it most highly.
I’ll leave you with the ending. My Heart is a Chainsaw has the most unforgettable concluding two paragraphs of a novel I’ve probably ever encountered. I was so moved that I read them five or six times in a row, and I’m still thinking about them the next day. Stephen Graham Jones delivers a final gut punch that convinced me I couldn’t give his book anything less than five stars.
The last things it took from me were my breath… then my heart.
I’m grateful to Gallery Books and the author for the opportunity to read and review a gifted advance copy via NetGalley. Pick it up this August, just in time for a Halloween horror binge.
PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:
In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones.
“Some girls just don’t know how to die…”
Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called “a literary master” by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange.
Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.
Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.
Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges…a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.