Years ago, some friends of mine made a full-length horror movie. A slasher. They bought a van, drove it up to Connecticut, where they filmed for a few weeks. They did pretty much everything themselves, so they could pay for the things they couldn’t do themselves. They hired a pro cinematographer and a handful of real actors — Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, Peter Tork from The Monkees. All this to say, this was no backyard B-movie red corn syrup amateur-hour horror flick. My friends were members of the congregation of the Church of Horror, and they made a pilgrimage to Connecticut to make an offering in all seriousness.
I know people who live and breathe — whose blood pumps — for slashers. In a world that seems, at times, arbitrary and chaotic, they can rely on the unspoken rules of slashers. Those folks exist in the real world, not just in the celluloid frames of Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), or the pages of books like Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw (Saga Press).
The heroine of My Heart is a Chainsaw, 17-year-old Jennifer Daniels, aka Jade, of Proofrock, Idaho, is one such slasher savant.
“I write because I can’t draw. I write because I can’t cut to the basket slick enough to go pro. I write because I eat too many Sixlets and drink too much tea and my fingers get all jittery, and I have to put them somewhere,” writes Jones on his website, demontheory.net. “I write because, for a few pages at a time, I can make the world make sense.”
For Jade, slashers are a way of making the world make sense. There are rules to slasher films, after all, a precedent that must be followed. They’re a coping mechanism helping her get through life as a high school outcast with a hard home life, but, as with any coping mechanism, they also help her keep the world at arm’s length.
Jade is poor, and her parents are divorced. She does some janitorial work, which helps her pay for food and bargain bin VHS tapes of ’80s horror flicks, but which hardly endears her to her classmates. Jade’s father is Native American, and her mother is white, leaving her with a feeling of not fully belonging to either community. It doesn’t help that her mother has treated Jade like a stranger since the divorce. So Jade is left to fend for herself, as she lives with her neglectful, alcoholic father. That might not seem to be enough to doom a teenager, no matter how much they quote Halloween, to status as a pariah, not in the 21st century anyway. But as anyone who has lived in a truly small town can attest, Jade is doomed at least thrice-over.
A scholar of slasher movies, Jade sees herself as a Cassandra when strange disappearances begin to plague Proofrock and no one believes her hypothesis. She has cracked the code, and stands ready to usher Letha, who Jade sees as the story’s Final Girl, to triumph over the masked killer, whoever it is.
As the pages turn, My Heart is a Chainsaw reveals other horrors — neglect and abuse, gentrification, racism, and loneliness. The book culminates in Proofrock’s annual Fourth of July celebration, when the townies row or motor their boats out on the lake to drink and watch a screening of Jaws. The big celebration waiting at the end of the book works like a ticking clock — the reader just knows that something horrible is going to happen to spoil the party. After all, it’s a slasher. There are rules.
Jones’ other most recent publications, The Only Good Indians and Night of the Mannequins, won a pair of Shirley Jackson Awards, and TOGI racked up several other awards besides, so it’s no surprise that My Heart is a Chainsaw is already receiving early buzz. The author’s prose is lyrical, and his tone sometimes shades into reverence and remorse — reverence for the genre whose influence can be found in so much of his work, and remorse for the high school outcast those genre rules say he must put through the wringer.
