Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Oh my actual god.

I need to stare at the ceiling a bit over this. I won’t pretend this book is without flaws but it’s def the first true horror novel I’ve read in a while. It’s a cerebral, dark, devastating book and I can’t wait to read more from him

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squisheebee_'s review

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challenging dark emotional funny sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
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

I absolutely loved the narration of this book. Jade stole my heart & maybe it biased my rating.🤷🏽‍♀️

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falloutofmyactions's review

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dark mysterious medium-paced

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

3.5

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floralfox's review

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dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

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

2.25

I tried picking this up in October, drawn in by the reviews on the cover and the summary on the back. I was excited after reading the completely eerie, opening scene, full of dread and suspense about two tourists encountering something out on a lake, and never making it back to shore. But nothing else in the entire book matched the quality of those first twenty pages. I put it down for a while and picked it back up while teaching a horror film elective class which is mostly centered around the final girl trope (we watch Psycho, one giallo film, Black Christmas, Carrie, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Scream) so I was primed for a lot of the references and lore. But I struggled so much with moving forward in the book and can't say I enjoyed myself very much, even though in theory, I should've liked this book a lot more.

Overall, I don't think the book worked for a several reasons:

1. There's a duality to this book. On one side, it's extremely slow. Most of the book takes place in the rambling, obsessive mind of 17-year-old Jade Daniels as she relates everything in her life to a slasher film. She's a janitor and sometimes a scene of her picking up trash and thinking about a slasher movie can cover 2-3 entire pages, but none of the information Jade turns over in her head—and none of the actions she's taking—are significant enough to warrant the meandering narrative. But on the other side, the book is trying to cover so many topics at once—threading together several complex topics and histories, where none of them are red herrings and they all get their moment to shine in the end. That means it's a story about repressed personal trauma and history, a story about centuries-old Native trauma, a story about poverty and gentrification, a story about grief and revenge, a ghost story, a Friday the 13th knockoff, a modern slasher, and more all wrapped up into one... except that... most of the time, it doesn't feel like <i>any</i> of them. It feels like a 17-year-old girl rambling in any interior monologue that never stops because she doesn't do anything and doesn't talk to anyone.

2. A lot of important details are embedded into long, rambling dialogue from other characters, such as interviews or tape recordings, and the author is FAITHFUL to the style of long, meandering talking styles where characters repeat themselves, trail off, backtrack, etc. And because they're usually faithfully transcribed, there's nothing to break up this wall of text in the story—no body language, no atmosphere, no nothing. It's easy to get lost in the details.

3. I had to re-read scenes and pages SO MANY TIMES because I'd realize that I wasn't taking anything in because it didn't seem like anything was happening. Then, I'd go back, reread it, and realize that most of the time, I'd been right, and I didn't need to waste my time. Couple that with a lot of times where I couldn't keep track of the passage of time, or thought dialogue between characters jumped around in a way that was confusing, or couldn't orient the characters in space or understand what they were doing with their bodies (or why they were doing it)... overall, there was simply a lot of confusion. It felt like really sloppy editing, both in the point of being able to follow the story, but also in thinking that this 400 page book probably could've been trimmed down to 200 pages.

4. For being in Jade's head SO much, there were important times where I didn't really understand her motivations or feelings. For instance, why WAS Jade compelled to keep the secret of her father's abuse? Obviously Letha, Hardy, and Holmes' approach to trying to get this information out of her was absolutely terrible—but Jade didn't actually engage with their questions internally. And because there were really no significant scenes of Jade with her father after that scene took place, when the truth WAS finally revealed, it didn't land with the weight it should've landed with. It all felt very fractured and distant. In another way, I had no idea what Jade envisioned for herself or her own safety when sh was convinced that a slasher was coming to Proofrock and that Letha was the final girl. Jade had already attempted suicide at this point in the book, but I didn't have a strong sense of whether she felt like that she'd be merely an observer on the periphery of the violence or a victim in her own right—or even how she felt about that possibility! It just felt like she didn't engage with it, even though she was also obsessing about it, but that lack of engagement didn't feel intentional. It felt like an oversight.

5. For someone who was constantly piecing together the plots of 100 different slasher movies and constantly coming up with motivations and theories as to the violence and murders happening in Proofrock, once Jade actually had most of the information after the blood bath in the final pages, she didn't thread ANY of it together. There ended up being not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different murderers in the scope of this book... AND supernatural elements, which felt like a genre-shift, AND one of the red herrings ended up having some validity to it. That is a LOT going on without any sort of clarity at the end. And truth be told, of these four murderers, one felt cheesy, one felt unrealistic, and two felt simply underdeveloped.

There were some good ideas here, but some bad execution. Mostly a matter of style and editing, IMO.

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tesshersh's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad 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

4.5

I’m not sure if I extra enjoyed this book because I’ve read so many BAD books lately, or if it really IS that good, so take this with a grain of salt. But WOW. One of my only gripes is that it touches on some themes that I’m not 100% sure I love being talked abt from a teenage girl’s perspective written by a male author, but I think it was respectfully done.
Spoiler for my other complaint:

I wish that the conclusion/reveal of the killer DIDN’T have a supernatural element. I think the author’s point of regarding real life not being like a horror/slasher movie, about things like gentrification & colonization being a type of horror and violence of their own, was backtracked a bit by letting jade’s theory of a supernatural element be true at the end.

Also: cannot recommend the audio book enough, cara gee was amazing

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heckyeaheather's review

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dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

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

4.0

This was a great listen if you're someone who enjoys the horror genre and that your MC also is an expert in the slasher/horror genre.
It can be a bit slow going sometimes, spending some time in our main characters thoughts and getting a bit wordy. Great first book of 2024!

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