My Heart is A Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
I would like to thank Lydia from Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Titan
Published – Out Now
Price – £8.99 paperback £6.64 Kindle eBook
Jade is one class away from graduating high-school, but that's one class she keeps failing local history. Dragged down by her past, her father and being an outsider, she's composing her epic essay series to save her high-school diploma.
Jade's topic? The unifying theory of slasher films. In her rapidly gentrifying rural lake town, Jade sees the pattern in recent events that only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror cinema could have prepared her for. And with the arrival of the Final Girl, Letha Mondragon, she's convinced an irreversible sequence of events has been set into motion.
As tourists start to go missing, and the tension grows between her community and the celebrity newcomers building their mansions the other side of the Indian Lake, Jade prepares for the killer to rise. She dives deep into the town's history, the tragic deaths than occurred at camp years ago, the missing tourists no one is even sure exist, and the murders starting to happen, searching for the answer.
As the small and peaceful town heads towards catastrophe, it all must come to a head on 4th July, when the town all gathers on the water, where luxury yachts compete with canoes and inflatables, and the final showdown between rich and poor, past and present, townsfolk and celebrities slasher and Final Girl.
The slasher film that brought us more reasons to fear Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth and the word sequel has a long and interesting role in horror. Are we watching horror for the gruesome and inventive deaths? The school jocks and high school royalty that tends to meet their death the most some could see as being quite therapeutic for us if you’ve been on the wrong side of them growing or are we watching for the Final Girl? The heroine who through all the chaos and blood shed finds a way to survive and give ourselves some home and a role model. This debate becomes the heart of Stephen Graham Jones’ powerful My Heart is a Doorway when the town sole horror fan finds herself in a growingly murderous situation which has all the hallmarks of her favourite genre, and she may be the only one to help a young teenager survive or may be enjoying watching the world burn a little too much.
Jade is very much looking forward to the end of her school term in the little-known mining town of Proofrock. She can finally escape a school where she is mocked for her dyed hair, t-shirts, love of horror and tendency to play pranks on the school inspired by her favourite movies. She can then finally move out of her filthy home where she lives with her unpleasant father the town drunk and his sleazy best friend. Jade may finally get a life on her own turns. But Proofrock is a strange town sitting on a lake that itself contains a drowned town; it also has a campsite known affectionately as Camp Blood, eerie forests, and its own ghost stories. Now throw in the arrival of some uber rich families who has decided Proofrock is the perfect location for luxury homes, yachts, and a time of change. Then two Dutch students go for an illegal midnight swim and are horribly killed. Jade recognises the standard triggering event for a slasher plot and as the body count rises, she focuses her attention on trying to help heiress Letha Mondragon who has all the classic beauty, poise, and kindness a Final Girl would need to survive if she can just pay attention to Jade’s advice.
This despite its obvious affection and love of slasher films is a much darker tale than I was expecting and a lot of this is down to the stunning character of Jade who is the focus of the story. Jade is probably a character many fans of the genre will recognise the school misfit, not understood and for reasons the book will explore both very angry t the world and suffering from her own trauma. Jade we first meet leaving home one night and having a manic unsettling episode that finally leads to a suicide attempt. This creates then some concern as Jade returns to school just as a series of suspicious deaths then commence. Jade’s delight/obsession in the light of what we saw is disconcerting – is this because she is a horror fan; is she is delighting in a hometown she despises finally getting shaken up or with the arrival of Letha a chance for her to help someone when she knows she herself is a hopeless case? Jade’s complexity is a highlight of the novel. Graham Jones makes us accept her for all her sharp edges and armour. This is helped by excerpts of Jade’s Slasher 101 school project to her favourite teacher both exploring the history of the genre in an intelligent and amusing way – she’s intelligent, does have her own morality and yet perhaps someone a little too keen to see herself as ultimate slasher fodder and doomed. The final outcome for Jade throughout though is uncertain which holds our attention throughout.
But while the character study is brilliant, we also need a good location and other characters to meet, and this delivers in spades.. Two standouts we come to love ae Sheriff Hardy and Mr Holmes who become despite both being older and perhaps more conservative characters acting as Jade’s real father figures and who may have more respect for Jade’s intelligence and rebellious sides than they’ll ever admit to her face. Proofrock reminded me of King’s It in a way that every main character and location has an unusual Proofrock story of their own if you dig deep enough which adds to the ongoing mystery as to are these killings supernatural or just plain old homicidal? The benefit is this allows the story to create within it many different types of short tales often where a character tells Jade and the reader their own strange experiences in this town. By the end we will recognise certain characters and places which make the final scenes of chaos even more poignant and memorable.
The horror elements are very much a slow build but the pay-off is worth the wait. We get the typical slasher scenes of young teens in love, bizarre animal deaths, unwary golf players and people who seem to have met unlikely accidents and there is a steady but unrelenting feeling that a much bigger disaster looms in the distance. As things start to go south, we definitely feel that Letha and Jade are in huge danger. The finale is an unusual affair of initially making me think we had one explanation for it all and then completely pulling the rug from under me as I made a sharp 180 degrees as to what I’d just witnessed. By the end we move from quiet scenes where it is dangerous to be on your own to a full-on spectacle of bloodshed and death where no one is safe.
If Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians is an ice-cold revenge story, then this is a much fierier sibling with colour, passion and revelling in its slasher roots and yet despite that provides a sensitive and intelligent look into why we love horror. Allowing us to channel and process pain and anger at a world that perhaps is deserving of being disrupted by monsters they don’t understand and gives us heroines that know how to survive it. This is very much Jade’s own tale of discovery and learning to face demons and while this is a horror story and there will be immense pain, unfairness, and injustice but she faces this on her own feet. I must warn readers there are themes of suicide and sexual abuse but at no point did I find that gratuitous, but it does go to dark places some may prefer not to visit. For me a great horror novel for 2021 and highly recommended.
