I am having such a good reading summer. I have had a plethora of five-star reads, including this gem. Also, this book tried to kill me by making me feel too many feelings. Fitting, with the body count and the genre.
Like all the books I really love and that give me feelings, especially when I’m not quite sure where those feelings are coming from, I am having a really hard time reviewing My Heart is a Chainsaw.
Jade is a teenaged girl in a small, northern town—half Blackfoot, half white. Her mother left her with her abusive father when she was a kid, and she’s scraped by half on nerve, half on horror movies as coping mechanism. Jade’s love for horror movies, and slashers in particular, is stronger than most people’s love for anything. She relates everything back to slashers. It is the frame through which she views the world. This makes her a strange person to have a conversation with, but there are a handful of people who see past her odd, often off-putting, exterior (for example, there’s a runner in here to do with Jade dying her hair using strange substances, never to good effect) and try to make up for the lack of structural and familial support in her life.
The plot of this book has to do with Jade being convinced that a real-life slasher is about to go down in her town, probably on the 4th of July, and she identifies the pretty, kind (and rich) new girl Letha as the obvious candidate for the Final Girl. The book follows Jade’s attempts to convince someone, anyone, to listen to her so they can prepare for what’s to come. This goes about as well as you would expect, particularly when all of Jade’s dialogue is half out of reality.
The book also alternates chapters with a series of Slasher 101 papers she wrote for her history teacher, Mr. Holmes, who is one of the figures who reaches out regularly to Jade and tries to provide what support he can for her. The Slasher essays are 100% gold. Jade (and by extension SGJ) is extremely knowledgeable and full of insight about her favorite genre, and it is largely through these essays that we see the extent of her obsession, and get hints that she is using her fervor as something to hide behind in order to avoid processing her personal trauma. It’s extremely well done, and interesting for what you learn about Slasher movies! And what they mean to people as an art form.
While Jade leans so heavily into the narrative she wishes were true, it becomes clear that in the end, life isn’t a slasher movie, it’s much more complicated, and in some ways, much more cruel (and in others more kind). I absolutely cannot wait to see what SGJ has in store for us in the sequel, which is set to be published in February 2023. I own a hard copy of this, and the audio, which is how I read the book, because it catapulted to favorite status pretty quickly. Cara Gee does the narration, and she is fantastic at it.
Read Harder Challenge 2022: Read a horror novel by a BIPOC author.
CBR BINGO: New
I picked this book for the NEW square because this book has really kicked off a horror fixation for me, but also because it’s a new author to me (Stephen Graham Jones, I am now obsessed).
