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A review by chasegartzke
My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
4.0
On the surface, this is a not-so-scary horror novel - and yes, I would consider this horror. The story can be convoluted, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t start out disliking Jade. She could have been - should have been - more sympathetically written from the start. But she grew on me as the chapters droned on.
This has the slasher aspect, and the supernatural aspect, which started to have a nostalgic feel to them as I do really love horror films. But this book’s main triumph (of which I’d argue there is really only one) took this from a 2 star to a solid 4 star read.
Beneath the surface of this mild horror lies what this book is actually about; emotional pain. Our main protagonist is a traumatised girl with multiple suicide attempts under her belt. Among her mechanisms for coping with her trauma is her infatuation with horror films, particularly slashers. She romanticizes the slasher, because slashers are - in her mind - about a balance between revenge and rescue, both of which are things she ultimately wants for herself (and both are roles in which she sees herself). The potential (eventually realized) slasher embodies revenge, and because of that she finds herself yearning for the slasher to be real (until she realizes he actually is). Letha Mondragon is the embodiment of rescue, which is something Jade also wants. It’s what she needs. She needs to be rescued from her trauma, and she wants revenge.
After probably the most hectic chapter I’ve ever read, complete with mass supernatural bloodshed, we get a moment with two fighting bears - very lightly foreshadowed. The author seems to indicate that these are two different types of bears, or at the very least not equal in size or strength. My hunch is this symbolized what Jade needed from her mother; a protector who would stand up to her much stronger father, who was a perpetrator of much of Jade’s trauma. But don’t be fooled into thinking he was the only one. Jade was “othered” by her community and school, broken both of her parents, and traumatized by racism towards indigenous people. This girl was repeatedly hurt, and Stephen Graham Jones did a decent job of framing this with the slasher genre in order to tell the story of this traumatized little girl - her immense emotional pain caused by other people being the actual horror.
Look deeper. There’s a treasure here.
This has the slasher aspect, and the supernatural aspect, which started to have a nostalgic feel to them as I do really love horror films. But this book’s main triumph (of which I’d argue there is really only one) took this from a 2 star to a solid 4 star read.
Beneath the surface of this mild horror lies what this book is actually about; emotional pain. Our main protagonist is a traumatised girl with multiple suicide attempts under her belt. Among her mechanisms for coping with her trauma is her infatuation with horror films, particularly slashers. She romanticizes the slasher, because slashers are - in her mind - about a balance between revenge and rescue, both of which are things she ultimately wants for herself (and both are roles in which she sees herself). The potential (eventually realized) slasher embodies revenge, and because of that she finds herself yearning for the slasher to be real (until she realizes he actually is). Letha Mondragon is the embodiment of rescue, which is something Jade also wants. It’s what she needs. She needs to be rescued from her trauma, and she wants revenge.
After probably the most hectic chapter I’ve ever read, complete with mass supernatural bloodshed, we get a moment with two fighting bears - very lightly foreshadowed. The author seems to indicate that these are two different types of bears, or at the very least not equal in size or strength. My hunch is this symbolized what Jade needed from her mother; a protector who would stand up to her much stronger father, who was a perpetrator of much of Jade’s trauma. But don’t be fooled into thinking he was the only one. Jade was “othered” by her community and school, broken both of her parents, and traumatized by racism towards indigenous people. This girl was repeatedly hurt, and Stephen Graham Jones did a decent job of framing this with the slasher genre in order to tell the story of this traumatized little girl - her immense emotional pain caused by other people being the actual horror.
Look deeper. There’s a treasure here.