Stephen Graham Jones' MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW

 If we go fast enough, if we close our eyes tight enough, if we ball our fists tight enough and lean forward far enough, then we can still remember what it's like to not just be terrified, but to be so terrified that we start grinning, and finally laughing, and then whether we get away or not doesn't matter anymore, because whatever's after us can never touch our smile.

Is it weird to open a directionless essayish thing about a new novel by quoting from its afterword? It feels weird. But this paragraph from the afterword of Stephen Graham Jones' latest, My Heart is a Chainsaw, struck me as such a perfect encapsulation of our culture's love for horror stories and their cathartic power that I had to include it here.

I am not the target audience for My Heart is a Chainsaw. I'm not a huge slasher movie fan. I'll sit down and watch one every now and then, but just as its parent genre of horror isn't my favorite, the slasher subgenre is something of which I am certainly aware, and have hilarious memories of watching at slumber parties in the 1980s, but for me, slashers are more a thing for which I appreciate the appreciation of others rather than really seek out on those rare occasions these days when I can bring myself to sit down in front of a movie or TV screen.*

So, if Jennifer "Jade" Davis, the teenaged heroine of My Heart is a Chainsaw, were to meet me, she would probably get frustrated with me in minutes, but if she gave me a chance she would find me a more attentive audience than, say, her history teacher, Mr. Holmes, for her lectures on the subgenre. These are delightful, peppered with encyclopedic knowledge, a head for real world applications of the lessons learned, and her smarter-than-smartass delivery of these insights. Seriously, if you think you don't have time to read the whole book** you owe it to yourself to get your hands on a copy for an hour or two to just enjoy the "Slasher 101" essays Jade has submitted throughout her checkered high school career as extra credit work for Mr. Holmes. They appear between each chapter of the narrative proper, and are the sassiest things you'll read this season, if not this year, and could be packaged and marketed as a chapbook all their own to great success.

Jade has grown up in a tiny Idaho town with a colorful history all its own even before it gets discovered by a small consortium of millionaires-or-billionaires. Founded in the years leading up to Idaho's statehood (just a week before my bordering home state of Wyoming's in 1890) and relocated once after a dam was built to create a reservoir that was unofficially christened Indian Lake, Proofrock has legends of a dead preacher in the original drowned town, a drowned "lake witch" whose origin story still inhabits living memory, and a traditional July 4 party in which a giant inflatable movie screen is placed on the town's beach, the better to be viewed from rafts, inner tubes, paddle boats and anything else that floats, for a community-wide screening of, of course, Jaws.*** How could Jade, a semi-outcast unwanted by either parent and working as a janitor for a variety of county and municipal buildings (including her high school) to save up to get the hell out of town after she graduates, not grow up a horror fan?

It also, as of the area's discovery by the new rich settlers who call themselves "Founders" in true colonial bullshit fashion, the site of an exclusive new housing development on the other side of Indian Lake called Terra Nova, from which cigarette boats and yachts are deployed to bring the settlement's children to school in Proofrock and the grown-ups to patronize the tiny local business district when the fancy strikes them. It's not enough for them to buy up the best views and privacy and build themselves a special little enclave; they want to be loved for it, too, so they know they've got to spread cash around to buy the resentful locals' adoration.****

Among the newcomers is one Letha Mondragon, a paragon of 21st century femininity (self-rescuing princess edition) whom Jade immediately pegs as born to be a Final Girl almost before Jade realizes that they might just actually be living a slasher movie plot in real life. Only Letha is so very modern and so very much a paragon that she misinterprets Jade's attempts to prepare her for her coming role as cries for help from a sociologically challenged and domestically desperate peer and believes that it is Jade who needs her help, rather than that she needs Jade's. The relationship that develops between them is complex and fascinating even as circumstances ramp up and the situation becomes one in which there is very much not time for a complicated and fascinating relationship to develop as all around them Plot. Happens. Oh so very much Plot Happens. Plot Happens in ways that feel as inevitable as a formula slasher film but also, highlighting Stephen Graham Jones' incredible skill as a novelist, would bear at least two different and contradictory interpretations right up until the final chapter (which is, delightfully, called The Final Chapter, because all of the chapters are, I believe, named after classics of the slasher genre).

And I'm not going to say anything more about it because you're going to go get it and read it now, aren't you? And then come back here and talk to me about how ending a story with a scene straight out of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom made me legit ugly cry.

*Which is very, very rare these days. I did go to a theater to see the Denis Villeneuve Dune because of course I did, but almost didn't make it home afterwards because of the migraine the theater's way OTT sound system induced. As for TV, I'll watch the new Great British Baking Show every week purely as a sort of Friday night palliative, and I'm sort of half-assedly watching the World Series aka "what if both teams were villains" but otherwise these days, I don't have the patience for it. Time spent watching TV, even prestige TV that's aimed squarely at me and my interests, is time I could be spending reading. I'm getting old, y'all.

**If so, what is wrong with you? Who hurt you? Who is wasting your time for you? Life is too short.

***Which, Jade argues eloquently in one of her Slasher 101s, is actually a stealth entry in the slasher genre. If you want to read said eloquent and persuasive argument, you know what you've got to do.

****Which, boy oh boy, Stephen Graham Jones might have written this scenario just for me, because my family got priced out of my birthplace not long after I was born, and are watching the same thing happen at a slightly slower pace in the town to which we moved (both in Wyoming) right now. The former was actually a lost cause before I was born; we were only there for my dad's state job; the latter started getting eaten by Big Carpetbag Money before I was born as well, but the first development didn't quite kill off the host the way the second wave now is. For more on what Big Carpetbag Money can do to quaint little rural areas, I'll refer you to Justin Farrell's excellent analysis in Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West.