my heart is a chainsaw by stephen graham jones

For a slasher fan as myself I reveled in the slasher speak and pop culture references. This convinces her to see beautiful rich girl Letha Mondragon as a potential final girl – and ultimate savior. We follow Jade – a recent high school graduate as she slowly begins to believe that a slasher film is unfolding in her very town.

Jade is cool in the way that girls that love gore are – meaning her styling choices are questionable, her social skills nonexistent except when she’s spouting slasher speak and slasher trivia – and honestly I ADORE HER FOR IT. Now Jade is everything a horror lover as myself loves, in fact had we been in high school together we would’ve had slasher sleepover parties. The book opens with a very dark and creepy prologue – but I’ll admit that I wasn’t crazy about the two foreign tourists and was happy to meet the actual protagonist, Jade Daniels. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. 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. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. 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. 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. “Some girls just don’t know how to die….”

My heart is a chainsaw by stephen graham jones