My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

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Reader Friends, every once in a while a book comes along and kicks you in the gut. It then follows through with an uppercut to the chin, a hook to the cheek, and a kick to the rear when you finally fall to the ground. Who am I kidding, I fell after the kick to the gut. 

My Heart is a Chainsaw embodies those feelings. It sweeps you up in a story of high school angst, fueled by the misunderstood, horror-obsessed chick with a complicated homelife. It then knocks you down with the reasons for her trauma, her obsession, her need to find escape and meaning in the Final Girl phenomenon of slasher films. Just when you think you’ve had all you can take, you’re given a reason to hope. But we all know that hope is fleeting in horror films and in books. 

Jade is so close to graduating high school and moving out of her tiny town and away from her drunken father. She can smell the bus ticket that will bring stress and uncertainty for her future, but it smells better than home. But then a night goes sideways and she finds herself drifting across a haunted lake with horror films on her mind and a course set for her final destination. But that course is interrupted and she ends up in a hospital only to be spit out weeks later into the same circumstances that brought her there. Now with her town being split into two castes; the rich in Terra Nova, and the workers in the small town of Proofrock who are building the new mansions, Jade finds herself face to face with an actual Final Girl. She’s everything a Final Girl should be and Jade takes it upon herself to equip the Final Girl with all the tools and knowledge necessary to save the town of Proofrock from an angry spirit that lives in the lake and is determined to kill all that comes in her path. 

But it won’t be easy.

Oh, this book! I want to wrap Jade up and make everything better even though that’s the last thing she would want. My Heart is a Chainsaw is complicated, thrilling, and nightmare-inducing. The characters are fully fleshed out people with histories and futures and the horrors inflicted on them is a living, breathing entity. This is an absolutely terrifying novel that needs to be on every horror fan’s bookshelf. 

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Gallery Books for the advanced copy of this title. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

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