Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel
Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR
In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events
only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her
for in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature,
New York Times ****** bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.**
"Some girls just don't know how to die..."
Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw,
written by the author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones,
called "a literary master" by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due
and "one of our most talented living writers" by Tommy Orange.
Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw "a homage to slasher films
that also manages to defy and transcend genre." On the surface is a
story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart:
a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and
gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who
uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.
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. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her
story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.
