Review: My Heart Is a Chainsaw

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I hadn't read any Stephen Graham Jones books before, but this one had a mildly longer wait time at the library than I expected, and I still have The Only Good Indians waiting a little further down my to-read pile from the library. But for this one, I'm afraid I'm definitely not continuing the trilogy.

I guess I'm a sucker for foresty mountain settings - it's part of the reason I moved up to the Pacific Northwest, after all. And this setting, a small town in Idaho maybe 8000 feet in elevation, feels like it could be a thing of beauty to portray on screen, even if the rich peeps in their fancy cars (which they park across the lake from their homes since their homes are inaccessible except by boat) are bespoiling the beauty with their very presence and making you want them all to get got by some slasher villain.

That, for me, though...it's the problem.

I don't like slashers.

I never really watched any of the old classic slashers - no Halloween, no Friday the 13th, none of that. I've really only seen postmodern takes on the genre like the original Scream, The Cabin in the Woods, or the short lived Freeform drama Dead of Summer. The former was one that made me roll my eyes at every turn because it acted so above it all with all the tropes and yet played them out anyway for drama points, and from what I hear, its sequels are so indebted to its success that they simply can't let it go. The latter had some interesting ideas, and some well executed flashbacks (being from the Once Upon a Time writers helped), but also would've been utterly excoriated if it had come out even a year or two later in part due to the casting of Zelda Williams as a trans boy. The middle of these, it does play the tropes straight, but that's intentionally so due to the very meta-humorous nature of its setting, and it actually invites the audience to be in on the joke.

Unfortunately, this book, while it tries to have a certain dark sense of humor at times, it's not a sense of humor that gets me laughing. I have a very hard time connecting to any of the characters in this book, except to want to see them all annihilated because just about every single person in this town is a creep and a half. Jade, our protagonist, earns a lot of sympathy because of her traumatic backstory (which includes rape - it's definitely off putting to see that in a female character written by a male author, but Jones acknowledges in his author's note that Jade is inspired by someone he actually knew when he was younger), but I don't share her special interest in slashers, so I don't particularly enjoy her as a character either.

I'll still give this book an extra star because of how unconventional a person Jade is, certainly a protagonist not to be forgotten. And because of her little old timey TV and VHS tapes of slasher movies, giving this book a generally time warped aesthetic reminiscent of It Follows (a curious case of a slasher I appreciated, but still would never watch again because I just can't stand the whole "sex equals death" trope - a huge reason why most slashers don't work for me to begin with.)

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