FINAL BOY

My Heart is a Chainsaw, goodness. Where to start?

It is a horror novel, a love letter to slashers and a reinvigoration of the genre. Slashers, for the uninitiated, are films like Halloween, Friday 13th, Scream. There’s a killer who has his/her own reasons for killing, a succession of grisly murders generally of teens, adults and authority figures who don’t take it seriously until it is too late and the final ingredient – a final girl. The one to face the slasher down in the third act, to find their courage and reserves from somewhere to deal with the killer. Think Neve Campbell in Scream or iconically Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.

Slashers have tropes galore and rules and conventions, and films over forty years or more have been playing around with those rules and conventions, because rules are there to be observed but they are also there to be broken.

Jade Daniels is a misfit teenage girl who has subsumed her whole being and personality into being the person who knows about slasher films. She can’t even hear a person’s name without mentally registering that that was the name of the actress who played the third girl to be murdered in such and such an obscure film from 1987. She also spends her days mentally preparing for a slasher to come to her town of Proofrock – a mountain town in Idaho, with a big lake and awful history of its own. She’s preparing, but she knows that SHE isn’t going to be the final girl when the slasher comes, but she’s going to be the one who prepares and equips the final girl for whatever’s coming.

Oh, Jade. She’s just an incredible character – she’s so apart from everyone yet trying so hard to make connections with people – with the sherriff, with her history teacher, with the new rich girl who has come to class. She’s so uncertain but so sure of herself, so capable but so lost. She’s an absolute joy – I’ve seen her described as a girl whose feelings are too big for her body and I think that’s perfect. She’s fascinating because you just don’t see a central protagonist who so desperately wants closeness but is pushing so hard at the same time for distance. I’ve read unreliable narrators before, but you can tell that Jade isn’t unreliable because she is wanting to conceal things but because she simply has to be that way.

I honestly love Jade. I love her the way eleven year old me loved Han Solo. She’s one of my favourite characters in anything. I don’t think that we’d get on at all in real life, but I enjoyed every moment I spent with her. She’s an absolute ICON.

Stephen Graham Jones has quite an unusual style of writing – I think for two main reasons. The first is that it feels like it comes from a place of oral storytelling – Jade is pulling at your sleeve knowing that you’re going to wander off any minute so she urgently has to convey everything that she needs to get across before you check out. It is a style that can seem chaotic when you first get into it, like this is a story being conveyed by someone who is so desperate and keen to get your attention that maybe it is off-putting but if you stick with it then you soon grasp that despite the urgency of the storytelling you’re actually in the hands of someone that’s an absolute master at telling the story and you’re just going to be in for the best time if you just buckle up and let the story happen. And the second is that where most writers in the third act give you a scare, then a rest, then a scare – peaks and valleys, Stephen Graham Jones is just putting a housebrick on the gas pedal and saying ‘what happens if we just go peak, bigger peak, bigger peak, bigger peak’

He does a lovely thing at the end of the book where he talks about the creative process and the various iterations that the story went through and the number of times he tried to write it and couldn’t make it work, and it ultimately boils down to Jade. Once Jade arrived, she’s just such a force of nature that she propels the whole book and makes it work – without this specific character and voice I just don’t think that it would work.

I’m not the biggest slasher fan in the world, but I learned so much from this love letter – there are a number of essays that Jade writes (they are supposed to be history essays to try to graduate but they are really not what she’s supposed to be writing) that deep dive into all the various ingredients and rules and roles that people in slashers have to play and they didn’t feel like info-dumps – you’re learning about the stuff that deeply deeply matters to Jade and after a while you’re also learning through what she’s saying and not saying, why this stuff does matter so much to her.

So, great setting, insane pace, rich language, incredible voice, the best lead in horror and a writer that is just so in command of what he’s doing here, it all for me was a perfect match. And a lot of the horrors aren’t the person with the scythe or the nail gun or whatever, they’re much more subtle and awful.

I’m reading the sequel now, Don’t Feel the Reaper, and even though I only read Chainsaw about a month ago I just can’t tell you how much I was pleased to have Jade/Jennifer Daniels back in my life. The final version of the trilogy came out in March and its already top of my To Be Read list, despite everything else that’s on it.