‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’ – Stephen Graham Jones (Titan Books)

One of my resolutions for this year is to read more books off the TBR pile(s) and not spend so much money on all the other books that catch my eye. Well, ‘try’ not to… Anyway, this resolution led me to ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’; a book that (through no fault of it’s own) has been sat on my shelf for a few months. About a week ago, it was suddenly the right time to pick this book up and get stuck in. I finished it earlier today and… wow… What a read. One of those books where I had to ask myself why I hadn’t picked it up much earlier. Oh well, I got there in the end and that’s the main thing 😊 Let me tell you about it…

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 that 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.

I’ll kick off by saying that ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’ is one of those books where on the occasions where I’ve absolutely had to put it down (I had to do some work…) the plot has stayed in my head and bugged me with questions until I’ve had a chance to pick the book up again. ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’ tells you what kind of book it is but turns around very quickly though and says, ‘Am I though…?’ And that’s where the fun lies, encountering all these mysteries and trying to figure out what is real and what isn’t. How much of what Jade sees is really her need to escape and how much of it is horribly real. Of course I’m not going to tell you the answer but what I will say is that Jones is superb at setting the expectation and then playing all sorts of games with it. That is one of the things that kept those pages turning for me, the sense that the ground could shift at any moment and I’d be reading a different story entirely. And it did that at all the right moments.

Now, I love watching horror movies and I realised, while reading, that I haven’t actually seen that many ‘slasher’ films. A few, but not many. And if you’re the same as me, don’t worry. Jade has seen them all and what this means is that while the fourth wall isn’t actually broken, Jade is still talking to us as much as she is her teacher. The result is a love letter to ‘slasher’ films as well as another mystery to solve. Is there a slasher stalking Proofrock or has Jade watched one too many movies? And why is she so into ‘slasher’ movies anyway? The answer is heart-breaking but you end up seeing what Jade makes of that and it’s inspiring to see where she is come the end of the book.

It’s also a case of Jones playing with the toys of a genre that he clearly loves (I cheated and read the afterword but even if I hadn’t, it’s still really clear) and paying homage but also giving us his take on how it should work, or not, with Jade’s running commentary. ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’ is a book that tackles it’s subject matter on a number of levels and hits the target every time.

Me being me, I suspect everyone has already read ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’ and is wondering what took me so long, sorry about that. If you haven’t read it though, let me be the one to tell you that you really should. Jade’s ‘chainsaw heart’ left mine in pieces and even though it’s January, I don’t think I’ll read a better horror novel this year.