“‘You’re being paranoid,’ Jade tries to tell herself. But she doesn’t slow down any.” – Stephen Graham Jones, ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’
I’ve been wanting to read a good series for a while. It’s been since junior/senior years of high school—the Anne Rice Vampire Years as well as the time I read the first three Hitchhiker’s Guide books—since I read a book with a sequel. Unless you count the multiple Philip Marlowe books I’ve read, or Salinger’s Glass family books—of which I’ve only read Nine Stories and Franny and Zoey. Obviously, I enjoy some genre. Not so much, though, that I’ve been willing to go on the journey of a series. That’s changing this month, as well as a few fun things I have planned for next year.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
A book with prose that jukes, twists. A book that really, more than most, loves its main character. A book with enough blood and gore that it earns its slasher stripes (and they’re red). A book with more CWs than I can probably remember. And a book that will lull you into thinking things are going one way, but [Marlo Stanfield voice] it’s the other way. I’m talking, of course, about My Heart Is A Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones.
How do I start with this book? It’s thrilling, and as someone who gets really excited about talking shop, most of the thrills for me were digging into slasher minutiae with Jade Daniels. A senior in high school who’s even more over the circumstances of her life than I was at that age, Jade is convinced her town is overdue for a slasher. After all, slashers are all about vengeance and the twisted righting of wrongs (are they? Or is that simply what Jade thinks of them?). The wrongs Jade is railing against are myriad, beginning with her drunk dad and his loser best friend and spiraling out the the brand-new playground for the ultra-rich, Terra Nova, being built on the other side of the lake. Something is coming, Jade figures, and she preps for it by re-watching Friday The 13th for the 1300th time.
A book that thrills me this much is hard to talk about for the same reasons I need to see a horror movie twice before I can properly evaluate it. These stories get me so amped up. So I do feel like I should issue a harbinger’s warning: this book is not going to be what you expect it to be. The third-person narrator is very close to Jade’s interiority, and Jade is Maybe Undiagnosed ASD or ADHD, or Maybe She’s A High School Senior Having A Hard Time, or Maybe She Can’t Tell Real Life From Movies. SJG is leaning hard into the yarn-spinner’s voice, and he’s putting us in the narrative-weaving mind of Jade Daniels. Which is a long way to say, sometimes the prose is weird and hard to follow. In ways I enjoyed! But be prepared. It is also not a straight slasher, no matter how many times our narrator tells us it’s gonna be. Be prepared. SGJ’s backing you down in the post, but like Hakeem, he’s jump-stopping without establishing a pivot. No way to know which way he’s going.
A side note, because he mentions it in the acknowledgements (SGJ writes the most wonderful acknowledgements): “But,” SGJ writes, “Joe Monti: it would have been so easy for him to make me resculpt this novel such that Jade being Blackfeet would be instrumental instead of incidental…Instead he did what good editors do…” Look, I love love love Mongrels and The Only Good Indians (still, I think, my favorite). It was nice, though, to see a story set in a relatively mainstream-USA town. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know I deliberately read a lot of authors who aren’t white. I worry sometimes that primarily white audiences demand a certain performance of otherness from writers from marginalized groups, and I worry sometimes that writers of color and LGBTQIA writers feel boxed in by perceived expectations. What this boils down to is I want writers to feel empowered to write whatever the hell stories they want to write. It seems like SGJ feels free with this book, and that rocks. This book rocks.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? How about something from the unequivocal GOAT, the single most consistent movie franchise that exists, Scream? Brendan recently brought up that this Sugar Ray from Scream 2 sounds like it was supposed to be a Weezer song, and—yeah. What a jam! Would you rather spend a weekend with Ghostface or Mark McGrath? It’s an easy call for me. This song is good, though.
BONUS LINK UP TOP because I got a poem published! Go read “UP LATE WATCHING X-MEN FIRST CLASS!” Many thanks to Passionfruit Review for not only publishing my work but also maybe being the first journal I’ve been published in with a name my parents can understand? Cotton Xenomorph, Whisk(e)y Tit, Moist Poetry Journal, Kicking Your Ass—I suppose there’s nothing gory about The Rumen or Wrong Turn, unless you look up “rumen.” Both are ominous, though.
Hey, since we’re making October Stephen Graham Jones month—or at least Jade Daniels month—how about some good news from Sophia Stewart at Publisher’s Weekly? A whole bunch of out-of-print SGJ books are coming back! Much like how this blog will always cheer when a basketball court gets restored, we love love love to see out-of-print books getting another run.
Speaking of basketball courts—goddamn, this blog is free? That was a professional-ass segue—check out what Arthur and William from Hoop Dreams are doing in Garfield Park. Charles Thrush has the story at Block Club. “Basketball creates family,” William says, and he’s right.
Going through my phone and realized I somehow never linked to this Kelly Link writing prompts post on Lit Hub. Save this for any time you’re stuck. Stuck on anything, really, I think this article would help if you found yourself at the center of a slasher.
Baseball season just ended—talk as much trash on the White Sox to me as you want, IN THIS HOUSE we believe Jerry Reinsdorf should be buried under the Sears Tower—so it’s a good time to elegize the Oakland A’s. This blog’s stated goal is the sweaty “elegizing all the stuff I think is rad in the face of capitalism’s apocalypse,” and the A’s are worth elegizing. Frank Thomas played for them. Rickey Henderson, too. Anyway, here’s the inimitable Ray Ratto at Defector. A pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “It is a testament to where the A’s are as they end their decades in Oakland that the brief viral fame and quiet withdrawal of The Ass Hat was not the most damaging team-related social media release of the week. This is because there was also Fisher’s soulless and roundly derided letter pretending that he ever had an ongoing affinity for the team and its history and its followers. It was one brown note after another, all the way down to his reference to the earthquake that interrupted the team’s final championship run. Which he misspelled.”
The world’s oldest story? Well that’s a way to get me to click on an article. Ray Norris at The Conversation tells us about the Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades, and how cultural myths about this constellation are seen everywhere from ancient Greece to Australian Aboriginal groups. It’s possible that these stories go back 100,000 years, and it’s possible you haven’t taken the time to look at the stars lately. Go out and see what you can see tonight.
What’re you still doing here? It’s October! Go read Vine again! But also, let’s get a look at that ass hat.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Jade Daniels is a video tape collector, and she reminds me of Randy from Scream, who worked at a video store, and an episode of The Daily Zeitgiest recently was talking about how cool it is when movie theaters have events with someone’s hyper-specific programming scheduled, and it got me thinking. Shoutout to everyone making $20 an hour or less who has great taste. Yes, you, person with a screenplay that may or may not ever get made but is definitely better than Transformers One. Or you, person who maybe isn’t creative but definitely knows how to decorate better than the Missouri Gun People. USian society doesn’t value the right things—this country is, of course, one big Terra Nova—but I see you, good taste haver with a thankless job. I hope good things happen for you this weekend.
Jade Daniels is my Final Girl.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris