A review by thereadingrambler
My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

dark emotional sad tense

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

As would be expected from Saga Press and Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart is a Chainsaw is a complicated, layered, and nuanced book that brings ties together so many elements in equally and elegantly gruesome and heartbreaking ways. The book opens with the mysterious deaths of two tourists to Proofrock, a small mountain town in Idaho. We then cut to Jade, our main character, a half-white, half-Native American girl and a senior in high school. Her father is neglectful to the point of abuse; her mother is entirely absent. Jade is obsessed with slasher films, particularly ones from the Golden Age of slashers: the 70s and 80s. She’s seen them all, obsessively re-watches them, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of their history, production, trivia, and legacy. The reader learns through Jade’s narration and through interstitial chapters called “Slasher 101,” which are Jade’s extra credit essays for her history teacher, Mr. Holmes. Jade wants nothing more than to find herself in the middle of a slasher film, so when a beautiful, rich girl shows up at her school (the daughter of one of the mega-rich building luxury vacation homes across the lake) and then almost immediately discovers the corpse of one of the dead tourists, Jade begins piecing together omens and signs of a coming slasher. She takes it upon herself to train this girl, Letha, to be the Final Girl. As the novel progresses, Jade’s life falls apart more and more quickly, concomitantly with her increasing obsession with the predicted slasher film.

Although all the aspects of her trauma are given out in drips and drabs, the reader can quickly identify Jade is a heavily traumatized teenager—if her interactions with her father and his drinking buddy in the first chapter isn’t enough, driving her out into the freezing cold of Idahoan spring, her suicide attempt at the end of the first chapter should really tip the reader off. Jade’s fixation on slashers is quickly understood to be some kind of coping mechanism, particularly through her “Slasher 101” essays. In her first entry, she ends by writing, “that in the slasher, wrongs are always punished….all the dead people are people who were asking for it” (34). Jade’s explanation for her affinity reflects what others have written. S.F. Whitaker writes,

You would think rape-revenge or other revenge trope stories would be immensely painful for survivors. The opposite is quite true for some. They will pick up the book knowing full well that the tome in their hands addresses rape, and murder, and harm of a child. Instead of just reliving and rehashing pain, there is a pay off. There is strength in the survivor, and gratification in the villain getting theirs. You triumph with the protagonist, rather than being dragged down by the subject matter. I will admit, as a trauma survivor, I find these journeys to be comforting. I don’t relive events over and over, but instead find triumph right along with the characters in the book. (Whitaker)

In another article, Mel Ashford explains,

That the opportunity for controlled confrontation of our anxieties can be deeply powerful should come as no surprise. After all, a large part of the experience of trauma comes from and is experienced as a loss of control—often in horrific, unpleasant ways. And the situation only deepens after experiencing trauma, as survivors can feel like they’re losing control of their lives as they wrestle with the emotions their experience has left them with. (Ashford)

From a more academic perspective, Morgan Podraza writes in her article on Laurie Strode,

We can use the final girl trope now to reimagine spaces for healing or futures for people with trauma. A survivor’s future will always include memories of that trauma, and it’s important to acknowledge that trauma exists and continues to affect the reality of people who experience it. They deserve happy, healthy futures, too. People don’t have to only be defined by the negative parts of this experience. (Podraza)

To the contemporary horror fan, the figure of the Final Girl is familiar to the point of mundanity, but the term was first introduced by Carol J. Clover in her article “Her Body, Himself” in 1987. This article explored the identification between the (observed/assumed) adolescent boy audience of slasher films and the young woman or teenage girl who eventually defeated the slasher (usually) himself. Many scholars have come after Clover expanding on these ideas—discussing points of intersectionality—and con-temporizing it for the 21st century. In the introduction to the 2015 edition of her book, Clover notes that the Final Girl is often seen through a “girl power,” or feminist, lens—imbuing her with a sense of power. It is this interpretation that Jade romanticizes, explaining to the reader (to herself?) over and over that the Final Girl is there to put everything to rights. For Jade, if the Slasher (the person) is here to avenge something, his murdering spree is justified (however twistedly), but eventually, he must be stopped. The Final Girl is able to rise above everything that happened to her and enact justice—not revenge.

In the light of Clover’s and other’s analyses, horror cinema of the 90s and 00s leaned in even more heavily to this idea of the empowered Final Girl, with the 2010s and 2020s seeing a rise of meta-horror—where the Final Girl trope is explicitly called out and made a central part of the film or book itself, a move that pushes even further into the possible feminist interpretations of the Final Girl. Thus My Heart is a Chainsaw rests at an interesting juncture. The book was published in 2021, and the meta-horror element is clear—Jade is actively trying to create a Final Girl (we will return in a moment to why she cannot imagine herself as the Final Girl)—but the book is set in 2014—a time of a pretty different interpretation of “girl power” than 2021. But Jade’s references are almost entirely from the 80s. Thus, Jones brings together many aspects, analyses, and presentations of the Final Girl to construct Jade and her story.

As I noted before, Jade cannot imagine herself as the Final Girl. Traditionally (thus in Jade’s references and conception), the Final Girl is “pure,” and, Clover adds, has a “boyish” element. Clover specifically notes how Final Girls often have “masculine” names (e.g., Stevie, Marti, Ripley) or engage in “masculine” activities (e.g., Girl Scout, DJ, mechanic). Their purity is commonly (and correctly) connected to their virginity (with other girls being killed off for their supposed sexual promiscuity), but scholars have observed the Final Girl is usually white, gesturing to a “racial purity.” Final Girls are supposed to represent an idealized notion of femininity, the proto-typical white girl who inspires protectiveness and admiration for her virtue in an American audience. Thus, mixed-race, poor, traumatized Jade does not fit that mold, so she automatically excludes herself from the category of Final Girl. Interestingly, her chosen Final Girl, Letha, is Black.

Although this book is about slashers and a Slasher, I’m not sure if I would class it in the slasher genre because of the way Jones plays with the genre tropes. Every element of the slasher is present—often in a very forced way as Jade tries to make her fantasies a reality. Jade’s role as the main character but refusal to identify as the Final Girl flies in the face of Clover’s observation that the Final Girl becomes the point of view character in a film, the character hiding and running with her, killing the Slasher with her, and experiencing triumph with her. Jade aligns herself with the viewer, often sneaking through the town and woods to observe her Slasher suspects or Letha. She is the traumatized viewer of the film, identifying with the Slasher’s revenge drive and the Final Girl’s ultimate restoration of justice. The Slasher will kill all the people who have wronged her and enact her revenge, and then Final Girl will bring about an era of peace where Jade’s trauma is behind her, healed and forgotten.

To avoid spoilers, I won’t say more, except to gesture to the fact Jones’s toying and twisting of genre extends all the way to the end, variously positioning Jade in all of the major roles and plot points of the slasher film that she identifies at the beginning of the book. Overall, this was a brilliant horror novel that played with the genre and exhibited a meta-awareness without becoming didactic or preachy. His depiction of a traumatized teenage girl is hard to read—her personality, actions, and logic take massive leaps, and her decision-making skills are about as good as you expect an entirely unsupervised and un-parented 17-year-old to be—but she is realistic if heartbreaking.