My Heart Is A Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Or, how to survive a horror movie

Jade Daniels is an outcast, a loner, and a loser. Her mother ran off and left her with her drunken father years ago. She’s inches away from running out high school, but all she has to look forward to is a menial future as a janitor in her crummy backwater Idaho town.

With real life duller than dishwasher at best, Jade seeks solace in horror movies. She’s such an ardent fan, in fact, that her obsession is common knowledge locally. She’s considered the weird horror girl, and thus is further regarded as other amongst the otherwise tightknit little community she doesn’t quite feel at home in.

So when actual horror comes knocking in the shape of an apparently bloodthirsty serial killer terrorizing the town, it only makes sense that Jade is the one that recognizes all the hallmarks of a literal slasher on the loose… Now if only someone would believe her.

My Heart Is A Chainsaw is a literary twist on the classic eighties slasher movie formula, but whereas films like Halloween or The Slumber Party Massacre only had to fill 90 minutes of screentime, this novel fills close to 400 pages.

It’s an unusual twist on the old adage that the original book was better than the film it inspired: turns out a slasher novel is a wholly different beast to a slasher movie. It’s a different medium, and so of course the storytelling must be treated differently. And it’s interesting to see how Jones accomplishes the marriage of the medium with this genre most strongly associated with another.

But, of course, this is a horror book about a horror fan, written for horror fans — and so naturally the references to classic slasher flicks of yore are splattered as liberally as blood throughout its pages.

That may sound like forced fan service (and in truth it does sometimes feel like it) but it always makes sense within the context of the narrative. Jade doesn’t really know what she’s doing, she just thinks she does. Her interpretation of everything she encounters is through her encyclopedic knowledge of celluloid demons and final girls.

Speaking of final girls, Jade quickly hones in on who she thinks best fits that mold with regards to the apparent murderous rampage unfolding all around her. It’s Letha, a classic (though wealthy) girl-next-door who’s new in town. New in town because some uber-rich city folk are building a gated community on the outskirts of this podunk little town, on the other side of the lake, at the edge of the national forest — a location that also has its own violent history: a long-closed summer camp that saw a Friday the 13^th-style spree of deaths, not to mention the rumored home of supernatural local folklore monster, the Lake Witch.

Against this backdrop, Jade tries to unravel the mystery of what she’s certain is a filmic boogeyman made real. But though it may seem like her lifelong fondness of spooky cinema has finally paid off, the other side of that particular coin is that she so desperately wants to believe that she’s in a horror movie she struggles to appreciate that real-life killers don’t always abide by the establish formula of the slasher genre.

Look, it’s a given that pretty much any horror fan would find something to appreciate in My Heart Is A Chainsaw, but where this might just be a pulpy slasher story in fiction form, in actuality there’s a lot more substance, depth, and nuance at work. But don’t worry, it’s not too much.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. You can support Horror Harwood by buying My Heart Is A Chainsaw on Amazon here. Thank you :)