Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - My Heart Is a Chainsaw

This was... A bit of a mixed bag for me, if I'm being honest. On the one hand it very much is the classic Stephen Graham Jones writing style that I love in a horror novel. It constantly nudges you off center in a way that leaves you permanently wobbly, and paired with a main character who is exactly my kind of weird, this should have been a homerun. Especially when adding in the not-so picturesque small town as a backdrop, and some delightfully creepy local lore, I really did not see this going wrong for me.

But the pace, man. I just didn't get on with it at all. As much as I sank right into the whole vibe of it, there just wasn't much to focus on for the longest time besides a lot of slasher trivia. Me being a slasher girly myself, this also could've been top notch, but it didn't go deep enough into it to share anything I didn't already know, and then it's just a lot of rambling. Then we went from zero to sixty at the very end, and while it certainly helped me finish the book faster, it also made the ending feel sloppy and incohesive. And yet, I still love the author's writing style here, too, because he can really paint a fantastically gory picture when he leans into the horror hard.

Where does this leave me? Somewhere just right of the middle, and yet with every intention to continue the trilogy. I don't really know how to explain it, either.

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himinotebook's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Picked this one up on the vague recommendation of a Youtuber I like (shout out to Laura Crone) as part of my concerted effort to get back into reading as an adult, and wasn't quite expecting this book to hit me as hard as it did.

This one is really for the horror movie girlies, I'm a film fan above all else and this one really really spoke to me, it was a passionate love letter to the slasher genre that could only have been written by someone who lives and breathes it. I was constantly delighted and surprised by the observations it made about the form and how it turned them on it's head. I was also enamoured with the writing style, Stephen Graham Jones really throws some sentences down that made me go "damn I wish I could write something that poetic." The world of My Heart Is A Chainsaw feels textured and alive, like it's some great half-dead and decaying eldritch creature that the characters are crawling around on the back of.

The character work was also smooth as silk, this book uses the expanded scope of the medium of literature to do what slasher movies often can't, which is really put us in the main character Jade's head. You find yourself empathising with her and following the logic of even the admittedly bad decisions she ends up making because her mental state and who she is as a person is just so seamlessly communicated in every other facet of the writing.

My only minor criticism was this book had some slightly odd... I guess spatial pacing issues? I'll concede this might have been a me problem but I often found myself losing track of where characters were supposed to be, how they got from one location to another, how long it would take them to do so, whether it was still day or night etc. etc. A minor gripe but really not one that significantly detracted from my overall reading experience.

Also worthy of note that when I finished this, I closed the book, lay there for a minute on the couch and just burst into tears for like 10 minutes, the ending is so frenetic that the emotional gut punch of what was actually happening didn't hit me until I had a moment of peace.

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dontwalkintime's review against another edition

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Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

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litliz's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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flexolo's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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kingsteph's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

2.5

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gamerreaper13's review

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challenging dark emotional tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.75

This book was hard to get through. Not because it was profound or gruesome or enlightening, it was just so damn BORING.

Jade was annoying and uninteresting. The constant call backs to slasher films was cute at first but quickly became repetitive and irritating. I signed up for a slasher book and only got the slashing in the final 100 pages of the book.

The twist at the end was good and the gore (when it happened) was amazingly written, it was just having to crawl and claw through the first 350 pages to get there. I found myself skimming pages waaaay too often throughout this one.

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ktakeeley's review

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dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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