Sarah O'Connor

“…in the slasher, wrongs are always punished. The crew that did the bad prank years ago gets the just dessert they deserve, with a bloody cherry on top, and when they least expect it, making it all better…A little bloody maybe, but all the dead people are people who were asking for it,” (Jones 48).

Jade Daniels finds escape in the world of slasher movies. Her mom is absent, her dad abusive, and the town of Proofrock thinks she’s strange and wants nothing to do with her, which is fine with Jade, she wants nothing to do with them either. She prefers the world of slashers, where the masked killer gets their revenge and everyone who dies deserves it. She even gives her history teacher a Slasher 101 lesson for her year-end essay. Jade thinks that a slasher is just what Proofrock needs, and when she starts to notice the patterns of one forming she thinks that’s just what’s about to happen. But what’s hiding behind the slasher loving mask that Jade wears?

I wanted to like this book so much more than I did. It has a killer rating on Goodreads and is hyped about by so many, but I just couldn’t get into it. Slashers aren’t my favourite genre of horror, but it seems like I’m getting some lessons in the genre by reading a few this year. From the little I’ve read (and even less than I’ve seen) I find the stories formulaic, the characters not necessarily fleshed out, of killing characters in the most brutal fashion to be the focus of it all. I will say that Jones’ book (and Jade’s essays to her history teacher) acted as an excellent lesson into Slashers 101. It helped me understand the tropes more, see the themes of revenge and how it isn’t really all about killing in the most violent way possible. Jones clearly loves the genre, and My Heart Is a Chainsaw acts as both a love letter to the slasher genre as well as an examination on how the consumption of horror can be cathartic when dealing with the horror of our own lives.

But I really struggled with this one. For one things the chapters are very long and Jade is such a scattered protagonist that it’s hard to follow along with what she’s thinking. The book is told in close third-person with Jade so that there’s a distance between Jade and the reader, and I understood Jones’ choice in doing this, but we do get some first-person looks at Jade from her essays to her history teacher. She’s an interesting protagonist, I loved her obsession with slashers and how it slowly peeled away at what she was hiding underneath, but it was confusing. Jade wants a slasher in Proofrock so badly that she often envisions what she hopes the slasher will look like in Proofrock which had me confused about whether what was happening was real or made up by Jade in her hopes of the perfect slasher. In the Acknowledgements, Jones uses Mona Simpson’s short story “Lawns” (MASSIVE content warnings when reading this, it’s brilliant but it’s rough) as inspiration for Jade’s voice. After reading both I understand why Jones used the story and definitely see glimpses of it in his novel, but I really think sticking to a first person perspective would have made Jade more compelling and would have made the book easier to follow.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw sadly wasn’t for me, but I have an ARC of Don’t Fear the Reaper and the forthcoming The Angel of Indian Lake so I’m sticking with the series. Let’s see if Jones can make me grow fond of slashers!

Publication: August 31 2021
Publisher: Saga Press
Pages: 406 (Paperback)
Source: Owned
Genre: Fiction, Horror, Slasher, Mystery, Indigenous
My Rating: ⛤⛤.5
Summary:

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.
Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges… a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body.