I love horror movies. I was in my teens for the grindhouse movies of the 70s, in my twenties for the slashers of the 80s. My friends and I worked our way methodically through the horror section of our local indy video rental store (and a special shoutout to the late, lamented B-Ware Video in Lakewood, Ohio, an entire store devoted to horror, horror adjacent, and just plain weird videos). All of this is to say that I feel like I know at least a little bit about slasher films—at least I thought I did, before reading My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones. I was wrong.

Jade Daniels is the town outcast of the tiny mountain lake town of Proofrock. She exists on the margins—the margins of her abusive family, the margins of her high school, the margins of life. The only thing keeping her from disappearing completely, and it’s touch and go, is her love, no, her obsession, with slasher films. Jade looks at life, at everything, through the prism of her beloved slashers. She believes fervently in the hard and fast rules they are guided by, in the life lessons they teach. She clings to them like a lifeline. The trope of The Final Girl is real to her.

Proofrock, and the lake it’s built around, Indian Lake, has seen more than its share of tragedy and murder, both depressingly human and supernatural. So it’s not a far stretch for Jade to see a new slasher cycle playing out in real time, and to seek a final girl (it can’t be her, she’s not worthy) she can impart her wisdom to, in the hopes of stopping the mayhem to come. Jones makes Proofrock, Indian Lake, and the people who live there feel achingly real. It feels lived in. We get to know them all, so that when bad things start to happen, it hits hard.

Where Jones truly excels, however, is in Jade’s voice. She narrates the story in a breathless, compulsively readable stream of description, snark, and above all slasher history. Everything that happens, every scene, has an antecedent in the slashers, and Jade is happy to expound at length. Her knowledge (Jone’s knowledge) is encyclopedic and endlessly entertaining. With Jade, Jones has created one of my favorite characters of all time. She uses slasher films as a way to keep the world at arm’s length, as armor against being hurt. The thing is, she’s also using it to hide. Behind the slashers, behind the dyed hair, combat boots, petty crime, and universal fuck you to the world, is, I think, a girl yearning for love and acceptance. She wants to belong, just on her terms. Jade is so achingly real, and so heartbreaking, that My Heart Is a Chainsaw is sometimes painful to read, but the story is so compelling that you won’t be able to put it down. The final quarter of the novel moves with unrelenting fury toward an ending so surprising, yet so perfectly right, that I can’t imagine it ending any other way.

One other thing. For the one teacher Jade seems to actually like, her history teacher, she has written a series of papers the define and explain slasher films, a real history of the genre as seen through her eyes. Those treatises are sprinkled throughout My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and I found myself looking forward to each one. Through them, we get a crash course in slashers, but perhaps more importantly, we get to know Jade better.

I only discovered Jones a couple of years ago, but he’s quickly become one of my favorite horror writers. Hell, one of my favorite writers, period. After Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, and now My Heart Is a Chainsaw, he has confirmed his position as one of the very best in the field. Jones writes with heart, passion, and a brutal lyricality of language and voice that is always distinct, and always just right for the story he’s telling. My Heart Is a Chainsaw debuts on August 31, 2021. Pre-order it today, and be prepared to fall in love with Jade.