But that all works in Chainsaw‘s favor, delivering you a great horror novel that’s also a wonderful character study of this young girl. Jones knows his way around a slasher, though, and Chainsaw delivers in spades, with Jade constantly commenting on it all for us, helping us see the pieces falling together – except for our nagging doubt about how reliable of a narrator she is. And in a lesser book, that might be exactly what she was…but in Jones’s hands, Jade becomes something more complex and painful – a young woman who loves horror, sure, but one who also uses that love of horror as a defense mechanism to keep anyone from getting too close, and one that keeps her from dealing with her own very serious emotional problems. So when Jade becomes convinced that there’s a real-life slasher film starting to unfold in her little town – and that a newly arrived wealthy young woman would make the perfect Final Girl – she’s pretty thrilled, picturing herself as the Randy (of Scream fame) for this particular story. Jones’s love letter to the genre orbits around a recent high school graduate named Jade whose identity is forged hugely around her passion for slasher cinema – your Jasons and Myers, sure, but also everything from giallo to Psycho along the way.
If you love slasher films and you haven’t read Stephen Graham Jones’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, let me tell you how much you’re missing out on what may be one of your favorite books.
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