I had to sit with this one for a while before I felt I could review it. That's one of the things I love about Stephen Graham Jones's writing though. There's layers, and they're everything from a rollicking, gory, good time to biting social commentary, all in the same scene.

Jade is a great character. She's likable while trying her hardest to be unlikable. Her drive to give up and her survival through continuous betrayal and abandonment, because that's what happens when self-destruction only works so much, is one of those many-layered elements. Her horror movie knowledge is part of this, connection to stories and place turning her into a Cassandra. Is she a final girl? Can she be?

This is one where the pages fly by and then it keeps bouncing around your brain for days at least.

The only complaint - make a new chapter once in a while.

Thank you to Stephen Graham Jones, Gallery Books, and Netgalley for a free ecopy in exchange for an honest review.

my heart is a chainsaw is a slasher horror - a very well written one, but one that takes forever to get interesting. the pacing of this novel was so slow for the first 60-70% that i almost dnf-ed it, but the ending was phenomenal and i'm glad i stuck around. stephen graham jones does an amazing job at writing gorey scenes - some of them made me cringe because how much detail we got. everything just flows and i loved the whole slasher part of the story.

unfortunately, i didn't like jade at all. i don't know if you're actually supposed to /like/ her, but she came across as very annoying. her attempts at tying every misfortune to a slasher movie drove me nuts after a while. i get that that's kinda the whole point of the book, but it eventually was too much - too many references, so many long paragraphs that went on and on about slasher movies. jade made the story a lot less enjoyable to me because of that.

the writing itself was really good - i only read one short story by the author before reading this one and i loved the writing in both. it's clear stephen graham jones is a very skilled writer, but my heart is a chainsaw simply didn't work for me.

4.5 bloody stars

The true horror of this novel has nothing to do with the gore or the slashers. This was deceptively stunning.

Concept: ★★★★★
Pacing: ★★ 1/2
Plot layers: ★★★★★
Overall impact: ★★★★★

My Heart is a Chainsaw comes out on August 30, 2021!

Oof. How do I review this one. On the one hand, I want to start with the hard spoilers and work my way backward because I haven't see many reviews addressing the elements that I want to talk about. But on the other hand, half of this novel's brilliance comes from the reveals and final steps.

I guess we'll see how this goes.

My Heart is a Chainsaw was stunning. I had to read it roughly 1.5 times to get to this 5 star rating—let me explain. For the first third, I was NOT feeling the story. As someone who hated Catcher in the Rye for Holden's annoying internal monologues and meandering prose, the main character of Chainsaw, Jade, fit that bill too closely for my tastes. I wanted to reach into the pages and "make her stay on track, dang it!" Lots of pop culture slasher references, meandering thoughts, unlikeable character traits, the whole nine yards and then some.

But then some reveals hit us around 1/3-1/2 mark, and I was floored. Absolutely floored.

So now, at the halfway point of the novel for the first read, I went back to the beginning. I needed to see what I'd missed and see how the author had gotten us here—because clearly Jade had done what she'd intended to do... which was hide the truth from us and herself.

So let's just say that if you're not feeling Jade or the pacing of the novel on your first read, you're not alone. But it is disturbingly worth it.

This is a novel filled with guts and gore and slashers and horror. Not a single review disputes that. But it's also about Jade. It's about what she's not saying and not addressing—and yet putting in these pages like Morse code. It's about the true horror behind the curtain and the mind's way of (not) coping with reality. It's about our fantasies, our dreams deferred turned dark and deep, our use of pop culture to explain our present and idealize our future.

To touch on the surface plot for a bit, I found the slasher elements of this novel to be interesting. As someone who loves new horror trends and never quite got into the old-school slashers that Jade loves to reference, I didn't find it hard to follow. Maybe a bit heavy-handed, but isn't that the mode of the slasher in the first place?

I'm giving this five stars for Stephen Graham Jones' stunning interplay between surface plot and subplot, and his way of taking the familiar "outside" horror that we see in the movies and using it as a mask for the darker, intimate horrors that cut deeper.

A strong novel with a bleak outlook on truth and life and personhood, this is one that will linger with me for a long time.

Thank you to Gallery Books for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

My Heart Is A Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones

Short Take: I have lost the ability to even.

(*I voluntarily read and reviewed an advance copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.*)

Y’all, it is hot as Hades out there, and I can’t seem to muster the energy to do much more than suck up the A/C and watch scary stuff on Netflix. Speaking of which….

I’m sure you’ll all be shocked to hear that I’ve read and watched a lot of slashers in my day. (Freddy is my personal favorite, just FYI.) But my knowledge on the subject pales beside that of our story’s heroine, Jade Daniels. She is flat-out OBSESSED, and has watched-slash (heh)-memorized pretty much every slasher movie for the last few decades.

To seventeen-year-old Jade, these movies are so much more than scary masks and skewered campers. Obviously, they are an escape from her life, which is, well… awful. Her father is a lowlife drunk with skeevy friends, her mom isn’t in the picture, and her friends are nonexistent. But it goes deeper with her, to the point of being almost a religion.

So when beautiful Letha Mondragon moves to town, Jade sees her as the embodiment of the Final Girl, and she believes wholeheartedly that the massacre will finally happen for real. And Jade even has a few targets she would like to suggest.

You guys. YOU GUYS. There have been a lot of books lately with “Final Girl” as their theme, a few innovative writers who’ve turned the classic tropes inside out, but Jade is on a whole ‘nother level. She’s disturbed and disturbing and so very, very fragile. I wanted to adopt her and lovingly parent her and slap some sense into her all at the same time. She broke my heart and made me want to raise a defiant (if mostly middle aged) fist. I loved her, this frustrating, combat-boot-wearing, chain-smoking, smart-mouthed, destructive, achingly lonely enfant terrible.

Ok, ok ok, yes, it takes more than a great leading lady to tell a great story, and Mr. Jones knocks the rest of it out of the park. His pacing and dialogue are fantastic, and the action in the final third or so is WHOA. I do feel like some of the supporting cast weren’t as fleshed-out as they could have been. Most of the adults are ciphers, and the high-school kids were generally one-note types. However, the secretly-nicotine-addicted history teacher, Mr. Holmes, is charming enough to make up for it.

The Nerd’s Rating: FIVE HAPPY NEURONS (and some shoe polish, I feel like changing my hair).

In music a crescendo is defined as being "a gradual increase, a crescendo of excitement, specifically a gradual increase in volume of a musical passage."

I once saw a particular piece of music - Ravel's "Bolero" - described in some concert notes as a "sustained crescendo." I took that description of "Bolero" to mean that it starts off quietly and builds and builds and builds to an extraordinary climax but without the listener realizing that this gradual building of sound and emotion is happening until it's nearly at the climax and it's too late to do anything about it.

Stephen Graham Jones' "My Heart is a Chainsaw" is a literary sustained crescendo. The building tension and expectation creeps up on you and, even though I was flicking the pages faster and faster, I didn't even realize it had been happening until we're in one of the final acts of the story. It really is a wonderfully spun and paced story.

This book is heartbreaking, it's funny, it's sweet in places, it's a tragedy. Someone has most likely already used this description so forgive me for the lack of originality but it's also a love letter to the slasher movie. I don't watch a lot of slasher movies, I kinda bailed after the original Michael, Jason, and Freddie instalments, but that didn't matter here. You don't need to know the minutiae of the slasher genre to enjoy the book or get the narrative. Jade knows and she conveys that knowledge and her love for and escape into the films via the author's words on the page and it carries you along.

It's usually at this point I do the whole, "if you like x, y, or z, then you'll like this" thing but it's hard to do that here since it's so unusual. Just like with "The Only Good Indians," Stephen Graham Jones creates something different and just like with that novel, "My Heart is a Chainsaw" will stick with me for a long time.

It kills me to leave Stephen Graham Jones a two star review, but this book did not work for me at all. I’ve been slogging through it for months (I usually read books in a few days at most), and I just could not get into this story or make myself finish reading it. I went into the book expecting to love it - the premise is everything I love and I’ve enjoyed his other books and short stories - but nothing was happening for too long and Jade was annoying and I just couldn’t force myself to make it through the whole thing. DNF at 57%.

If you love slasher movies, you have to read this book. If (like me) you think most slasher horror is pretty stupid and can’t be bothered to watch it unless there’s a really clever twist, you might still want to read it. If you absolutely hate slasher stuff, give it a pass.

This book has an distinctly self-aware tone. Our slasher-obsessed protagonist/narrator, Jade, knows everything there is to know about the genre. Each chapter ends with a rather facetious extra credit paper written by her in which she explores the origins, structure, tropes, worldview, etc. of classic slasher movies. For me, these were possibly the most interesting part of the book and almost (but not quite) made me want to check out some of the gory classic franchises that I never bothered to watch.

Jade the “horror chick” is not the most likeable of narrators as she is sullen, antisocial, knee-jerk rebellious, and seems incapable of thinking/talking about anything other than slashers. That said, she is a pitiable character shaped by her rotten life circumstances (trigger warnings for just about anything nasty that can happen to a teenage girl), and the slasher obsession even makes sense by the end.

Most of the story involves Jade thinking that she sees signs/tropes/circumstances that indicate a real-life “slasher cycle” is about to play out right in her backwoods Idaho town (which makes her disturbingly gleeful). It’s a slow burn as you wonder how much of this buildup is real and how much is a figment of her obsession-warped psyche.

Somewhere between the 60% and 70% mark things finally explode into a frenzy of action as we find out what has been going on…kind of. It’s so chaotic and explanations of a few of the more “red herring” aspects are so lightly passed over and dismissed that some things remain pretty up in the air (perhaps intentionally as if teasing a sequel?). Personally, I thought that the slow buildup was much more interesting than the huge over-the-top action set piece, which is probably why I’m not a huge fan of the genre. I did not enjoy this as much as the author’s The Only Good Indians (which is itself pretty much slasher horror of an oddly literary bent), but it’s definitely worth a read. (3.5 out of 5 stars)

In this horror we’re following Jade, a senior in high school who is obsessed with slashers and is the local goth girl in her small Lake town. Her town is being gentrified by rich families with big yachts and even bigger homes. Soon bodies start to appear in the lake and in the forest, leading Jade to believe she is about to be in her very own slasher.

Jones has done it again. He created a horror book that is saying more than just terrifying you to the bone. I was little hesitant to enjoy this book in the beginning because Jade exclusively talks about slasher movies. She doesn't have many friends so its mainly the dialogue in her head that were hearing from and there are excerpts from her essays on slashers.

All this to say it was a little hard to enjoy this book without having an obsession with slashers. But I did find myself enjoying and wondering if who the bad guy was and if this slasher was actually gonna happen. The ending is gory and violent! Jade really has her moment.

So if you love slashers you’ll really love this book and if you don’t, you might enjoy the deeper messages that Jones is incredible at writing.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery/ Saga Press for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

After reading The Only Good Indians, this book became a highly anticipated read on my list. An homage to slasher horror films throughout recent decades, My Heart is a Chainsaw follows Jade, our protagonist who is an expert on slasher films. When she finds herself in a mystery that looks suspiciously like the beginning of a slasher story, she know her time to be a horror flick expert has arrived. While I've read some horror novels with the slasher/revenge trope, I have not watched many horror films with that subgenre. However, I didn't feel like that subtracted from my reading experience. The context clues were enough for me to continue following along in spite of the references, and I actually felt like I learned a lot about slashers in the process. The story itself was gripping and the mystery kept me engaged all the way to the end, and I liked how the story resolved itself at the end. This was a great horror read overall- a huge thank you to Netgally and Gallery/Saga for a copy of this eArc in exchange for an honest review.

This is the second book from this author I've read and it won't be my last!

I really enjoy this author's writing style. His plots are written with such complexity, so it takes me a bit to get into the story, but once I do, I'm hooked!

I really liked the inclusion of Slasher history from Jade's essays in comparison to the present timeline. It makes me want to go on a horror film binge!

There was a lot of pain and trauma in Jade's life and although we may not all be horror enthusiasts we can relate to escapism for our life.

The setting and atmosphere of the book were dark and moody - perfect for a spooky season read.

Oh boy. I loved The Only Good Indians with all of my heart. It was well done horror. This, though? This was a massive failure.

Is a book even good if it takes 80% of it to actually get going? Is it good if only 100 pages of the total 400 are enjoyable?

The abrupt ending, the bizarre pacing, and the downright overlong essay sections all make this a dud in my book. It pains me to give it such a bad score, but it was a slog and a pain to get through.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC of this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

I am a huge fan of 80s slasher lore so the premise of this book had me right away. I have never read a book by Jones before....but I definitely will again.

I loved the writing in this book. I have read a few other slasher novels but they were much more straightforward. The character development of Jade in this book, the setting of Indian Lake, and the constant ambiguity of what is real and what exists only in Jades head made this one stand out for me.

Next time I want a good slasher novel I'm gonna look into Stephen Graham Jones' repertoire!

I would give My Heart is a Chainsaw (Stephen Graham Jones) 2 1/2 stars, since it is impossible I'm upping it to 3 stars. I think this story contains the title of every slasher movie ever made and includes more details than I ever wanted to know. The main character is a 17 year old girl who is obsessed with slasher movies and predicts a slasher is coming to her small town. I want to thank NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an early copy to review.

I really did not like this book. First it starts off with a Swedish couple in a boat getting attacked by some monster. Then we jump to Jade and the story is all over the place. Jade's annoying and her reactions and actions don't make sense. The storyline was super hard to follow and this ended up being a hate read for myself.

I consider myself a thriller book lover, but this one was off for me. To start I was so lost at the beginning. A man and a women are in a boat, and then they both disappear. Then we meet Jade, and the story keeps jumping around. Jade is talking to two men at a campfire, Jade is in school and now Jade is stealing a custodian's outfit. Sit still Jade! I could not figure out the point to this story at all. I know it's supposed to be ode to slashers, but lets get to the point a little faster.

All in all I was lost more than not while reading. This book just wasn't for me.

I honestly have no idea how to rate this book. If I rated it solely based on my enjoyment of it, it would be like a 2.5, for reasons I'll get into. But I can't escape the brilliance of it, the brilliant tribute to the classic slasher, the incredible character that is Jade, and Jones' incredible feat of putting an honest to god slasher onto the page as well as they're done on the screen. So it's a 4 because this is something special.

However. This book takes work. It is not one that is easy to read or follow or take in. There's something about Jones' prose that I find very difficult to follow and I think that, as a result, I likely missed a lot of nuance that would have helped me better understand and enjoy the story. This book doesn't do the work for you.

This book didn't scare me - but it will sit with me for a long time. I didn't really get into it - as in look forward to picking it up, wanting to find out what happens next - until I was 80% in. Then it picked up and then I couldn't get through it fast enough. Normally I would not mark that as a book I enjoyed. But like I said, this isn't really like other books.

I LOVED THIS. I know the biggest complaint about this book is the style it's written in, but I think it's necessary to remember that this is written from the POV of a teenage girl. When /I/ was a teenage girl, my thoughts were all over the place and I tried to relate everything back to whatever I was most obsessed with at the time. I found this writing to be charming and a bit nostalgic.

Plot-wise, I thought this was fun. I love a good slasher movie, and this had the same vibe, which was all I wanted. I was trying to solve the case WITH the narrator, and figure out everything that was going on that the narrator may not be picking up on. It was gore-y, scary, and deeply engaging. I really can't recommend it enough.

Seventeen year-old half-Blackfeet, half-white Jade is facing the uncertainty of life after high school graduation in small-town Proofrock, Idaho. She barely talks to her parents and spends most of her free time watching the slasher movies she’s loved since she was eleven years old. Jade doesn’t really have any prospects, college, career or otherwise. She hardly has friends either, and especially not any her own age.

But with the moneyed Terra Nova development rising across Indian Lake from Proofrock comes new girl Letha Mondragon. Letha is beautiful, gracious and kind, and with her appearance, Jade is certain that the last piece necessary for a new slasher cycle has arrived. You see, Jade is convinced that her sleepy town, situated on the edge of a supposedly haunted lake, is ripe for a visitation from a serial killer a la Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, the fictional characters who wreak havoc through dozens of horror movies. Jade has absorbed so much slasher lore that she’s certain she’s identified all the signs leading up to a new cycle, even as she knows that she herself could never be the heroine, or “final girl” in the genre-specific parlance, of the story:

QUOTE
<i>No</i>, she can never be a final girl.

Final girls are good, they’re uncomplicated, they have these reserves of courage coiled up inside them, not layer after layer of shame, or guilt, or whatever this festering poison is.

Real final girls only want the horror to be over. They don’t stay up late praying to Craven and Carpenter to send one of their savage angels down, just for a weekend maybe. Just for one night. Just for one dance, please? One last dance?

That’s all Jade needs in the world, she knows.
END QUOTE

When bodies actually start showing up around Indian Lake, Jade is both gleeful and grim. This is just what she expected, and she’s happy to do her part to midwife the story to its inevitable and grisly climax. She’s not a killer herself, but she is happy to eavesdrop, tamper with evidence, and bear witness to the inexplicable deaths that are soon troubling Proofrock. Most importantly of all, she wants to help make sure that Letha is ready to step into the role of final girl and put an end to the murderous madness when the right time comes.

Letha, of course, thinks that her new friend needs help of a different kind. She’s certain that there’s a reasonable explanation for everything, despite Jade’s claims of a serial killer on the loose. But as the body count racks up and Jade’s personal life takes a turn for the worse, Jade starts to question her own role in the proceedings. She’s supposed to be the horror girl, the misfit sidekick who knows the history and sees the irony of it all. Once she realizes that the killings aren’t nearly as cut and dried as she’d imagined, she begins to awkwardly morph into an investigator and heroine in her own right:

QUOTE
Do people really kill for golf stuff, though? She wants to say no, except...Jason did kill that one guy for littering right?

But if greed or envy or gain is the motivation, then this is a giallo Proofrock’s in, not a revenge-driven slasher, and since this isn’t Italy in the sixties, she has to suspect there’s some other motivation, one that feels a lot more righteous.

And? She’s not <i>supposed</i> to have it all figured out yet, is she?

Doesn’t mean she can’t be trying, though.
END QUOTE

As the murders ramp up to a Fourth of July slaughter, Jade has to fit the pieces together in order to figure out who’s behind all the death and horror, and to reconcile her own worldview with what’s actually happening around her, even if it means confronting ugly truths about herself and her town.

This wildly intelligent thriller is a sheer treat for horror movie fans! Even I, who put slasher films way down on my Must-See list, was thoroughly entertained by this multi-layered examination of the genre. I loved the way Stephen Graham Jones constantly flipped the script, rendering My Heart Is A Chainsaw almost the 21st century literary version of Wes Craven’s Scream, which itself was at once a loving homage and a complete reimagining (not to mention revitalization) of the slasher concept. The love for slasher movies is palpable throughout this book, and I certainly learned a lot more than I ever thought possible about this corner of the cinematic world.

Above all though, Jade is a wonderful creation -- troubled and scarred but resourceful and determined -- not quite a final girl, but the girl you’re rooting for regardless. I was genuinely worried for her throughout, as she faces one awful setback after another but uses her love of slashers to overcome all obstacles. The ending isn’t exactly happy, but it is breathtaking, and one I’ll remember for a very long time.

3.5 stars
This book was a very slow burn but had a dramatic, bloody, gory ending. I almost gave up halfway through it but I pushed forward and I'm glad I did. The last third of this book totally saved it for me.

Jade is obsessed with horror movies- slashers in particular, and I mean OBSESSED. Way too much talk of horror movies and their detailed plots for my liking. I know it's important to the story but I was so annoyed by it about halfway through it.

This was my first read from this author and I'm not sure if I just don't click with his writing style or what, but I had a hard time following at times. I have The Only Good Indians on my TBR by him from many recommendations and I'm anxious to see how it compares.

If you like a good slow burn story with a big, bloody payoff and slasher movies this one is for you!

I admit slasher movies are not my thing. I did see a few of the classics back in the day, "Scream", "Halloween" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" but I had no idea there were so many in this subgenre of horror films. Not until this book. It reads like a catalog of slasher movies replete with story lines sufficiently retold making it unnecessary to have seen any of the movies. That said, it was also a bit tiring reading about movie after movie. I get that the main character is obsessed with slasher movies and they are essential to the story but after a bit I was like "come on, move this story along".

Set in the small town of Proofrock, Idaho, seventeen year old Jennifer "Jade" Daniels is a fish out of water. A loner by choice because of her encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies and her gut feeling that a slasher is about to disrupt the bucolic area that is Pleasant Valley, she is alert to all the signs that signal the coming horror. Wealthy people are moving in, building mansions across the lake from Proofrock and with them comes a new girl at school, Letha Mondragon. Jade instantly know that Letha is going to play a key role in the coming disaster, that of the Final Girl; the girl who brings the slasher down. Convincing those around her and Letha herself that a slasher will soon be loose in their community only cements the feelings the locals have toward Jade: that she has an overactive imagination and sees things that aren't there. Then the bodies begin to pop up. Is it just coincidence or is Jade truly prophetic?

I did enjoy this book although the writing style took some getting used to. It also was a slow build that seemed to take forever as the author delved into slasher movie after slasher movie. I liked the extra credit paper sections Jade was doing for her history teacher. They were amusing and informative about the construct of slasher movies. Considering the theme of the book, the gore factor was relatively low and there was enough humor that it felt as though the author was giving a wink and a nod about his own obsession with these movies. 3.5 stars.

Thank you NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for this Advance Reader's Copy. The book will be published August 31, 2021.