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New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones flashes his mastery of horror film history and raw teen angst in his novel, My Heart is a Chainsaw. Fresh off a double win at the Shirley Jackson Awards for his previous novel, The Only Good Indians, and novella, Night of the Mannequins, Jones lets his slasher film genre expertise shine in his heroine, Jade Daniels—a half Native, half white girl stuck in an abusive household in a dead-end Idaho town with nothing but her deep knowledge of the conventions of horror films to survive. (Fittingly, my review copy of this book arrived in a book jacket made to look like a VHS videotape cover.)
I was lucky enough to speak with Jones about his novel.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Devi Bhaduri
Jade has a wonderfully vivid voice. How did you create or discover this character, and what made her the right person to tell this story?
Stephen Graham Jones
Jade surprised me. She wasn’t there, the first couple—three drafts. Proofrock was, Indian Lake was, and Terra Nova, Camp Blood. Sheriff Hardy. But there was no Jade. Then she sort of just stood up from the shallows. The first time I saw her, she was trying to escape Proofrock by writing a tell-all book about what-all went down. Next time, she was one of three narrators—she was first, typing on a computer in the supply room of the sheriff’s offices, Hardy was second, dictating into a hand-held recorder while killing a bottle of bourbon, and Letha Mondragon was third, talking into the camera on her laptop for a story time installment of her makeup tutorial on YouTube. But Jade’s voice was the most compelling of the three, and she had the most at stake. You can usually figure out the protagonist by that, and by who’s in continual jeopardy, and who has the most potential to change. That all made her the right person to lead My Heart is a Chainsaw.
Devi Bhaduri
What was it like to write this book? How many drafts did it take, and how closely did your final draft resemble your first?
Stephen Graham Jones
The first version of this book that I wrote, back in 2013, kind of comes from me compulsively reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. For a few years, it was one of those ones I would return to, because it never lost its enchantment for me. That plural narrator, the royal first person, the “we,” the Greek chorus delivery method—I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And, the same as a pack rat finds a shiny piece of tinsel and drags it back to its nest, I dragged that Greek chorus back to the genre I love, horror. So, the first draft of My Heart is a Chainsaw was narrated by that “we.” But, because why be boring, the big turn at the end was that this “we” was actually a confused kid in an iron mask, who didn’t know his parentage, so he felt plural. Sheriff Hardy was there, but I think he was called something different at the time — he was pretty much Slim Pickens from The Howling. And still is. Oh, and, this first draft, the key that unlocked the whole narrative was this special breed of turtles that had orange on the back side of their shell, so that when birds carried them high to shatter them on the rocks, and get at their good meat, it left orange shards everywhere, which became a sign of danger — stay away, stay away. So. . . no, this initial draft had very, very little to do with what My Heart is a Chainsaw would finally become. There’s no turtles anymore, for one.
Devi Bhaduri
Horror is basically Jade’s belief system! Its tropes are like her religion, and horror films are her scriptures. Were you a teen horror buff too?
Stephen Graham Jones
What I knew in those growing-up years was trucks, mostly. I watched horror, but, to be honest, and probably lose some horror cred, I couldn’t have teased “George Romero” apart from “John Carpenter”—they weren’t even on my radar. Their films were, of course, and I had most of Jason’s and Freddy’s kills committed to memory, to play through in my head whenever there wasn’t a VCR at hand, but I knew zero trivia. Back then, I’d have to have had Fangoria or gone to horror conventions to pick that trivia up, right? And, living as far out in the country as we did, there were no magazine racks, for sure. There was an arena about thirty miles away, I guess, but it was for rodeos, not conventions.
Where Jade and I do line up is that we’re both on the outside, like. I was always going from school to school, either from moving or being kicked out — kicked out a whole lot — so I always felt like I was skulking around the periphery, just waiting to snatch in, bare my teeth, steal a scrap of whatever I could. Oh, I know where we line up: t-shirts. Jade’s got a history of being sent home for her wardrobe decisions. Me too. Both because of what was on my shirts and because of how many rips I’d artfully carved into my clothes. And I was forever making rattlesnake earrings and rattlesnake headbands, which basically just say “stay away.” And I used to cut my face to make it look like I was trouble, which is, of course, just a great idea. So, yeah, I guess Jade and I share a lot, really. But she’d smoke then-me at trivia.
Devi Bhaduri
Jade wants so badly to have control over her “story”—the one others tell of her life and who she is. Have you ever felt this way yourself?
Stephen Graham Jones
We all do, yes? You ever watch Dave the Barbarian? Cartoon from a few years back, didn’t last very long. There’s this antagonist in it, “Piggie,” maybe, who keeps having his grand schemes foiled episode after episode, until, finally, he decides to just kidnap the narrator of the show, and make that narrator read Piggie-approved copy. So, Piggie finally wins. And I think that’s what we all want, to kidnap our narrator, threaten them into submission such that everything works out for us. But, of course, I mean…Tuck Everlasting, right? Or, Garth Brooks’ “Unanswered Prayers.” Getting what you wish for isn’t always what you actually want. Yeah, I want to be in charge of my story, but I’m probably the last person who should be trusted with it, either. I mean, yeah, telling stories over the bed of a truck after a day of work, I might “take control” in that I adjust the truth such that I come off better in this escapade than a documentary camera would allow, but that’s the fun of storytelling: exaggeration, deletion, rearrangement. It’s how we all maintain a sort of personal myth, I think, and that’s super important. But it doesn’t help much in the actual moment, I don’t think. In retrospect, yeah, I faced that mean dog down. When that dog was actually coming for me, though, I flat ran away, yelping.
Devi Bhaduri
To Jade, the final girl represents hope of survival and maybe a better life. Do you agree, and do you think that horror resonates with a wide audience because the final girl trope can bring people this hope?
Stephen Graham Jones
For sure. What’s she say… “Final girls are a vessel we keep all our hope in?” She’s not wrong, I don’t think. Final girls are a model for us all, of how to push back against bullies. That’s what Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger are, bullies. They terrorize, they intimidate, they loom, and, finally, with a machete, with knife-fingers, they steal the lunch money you really, really need, spill it across the floor. But, with My Heart is a Chainsaw, what I wanted to do, at least a little, was push back myself, against how pure and virtuous and unassailable the final girl has become. She’s practically an unattainable model, these days, this princess-warrior who can do no wrong. But I think it’s important that, as a role model, the final girl be someone we actually recognize, that we can see ourselves being, if pushed. Or, even if not pushed, right? The final girl doesn’t have to be a supermodel, she doesn’t have to be valedictorian. The final girl isn’t about those external characteristics. The final girl is about the insistence you have inside you that you matter, that you’re important. If nothing else, I hope Chainsaw gets that across to someone who maybe needs it.
Devi Bhaduri
The ghosts of Indian Lake reflect the ghosts of gentrification and colonization. You wrote about real estate developers creating a neighborhood for the rich across the lake from a largely blue collar community, writing, “What one of the incoming residents said, kind of famously, was when there are no more frontiers, you have to make them yourself, don’t you?” Could you describe what drew you to write about this?
Stephen Graham Jones
Just seeing it happen to the West, pretty much. Sitting in a tire shop two or three years ago here in Boulder, talking to the old men gathered there to drink free coffee, they got to telling me how Boulder was fifty, sixty years ago, before it got all Jackson Hole’d — which is to say, before it got ritzy, exclusive, another Camelot. I think that’s when My Heart is a Chainsaw got that push in it. Or, that’s when I started indicting the Terra Novans for what they were doing. And, of course, it was just a fun and pretty obvious way to replay the whole so-called colonization of the North American continent—”attempted genocide” is really more accurate, and “land grab” works as well. And that land grab continues, and that mythmaking machinery that hopes to finally get us all erased, to get Natives erased, or turned into elves, or made invisible, or stripped of everything that makes us us, it’s still revved up as well. And, until suburban America starts deeding its backyards back over to us, it’s not stopping.
Devi Bhaduri
What are you working on these days?
Stephen Graham Jones
Just wrapped another slasher, and I have a haunted house novel coming out before too long, here. I’m writing for TV and film as well. Doing work in comic book land as well, which really feels like paying back into the system that I feel saved my life. Seriously. If I don’t find Secret Wars on a spinner rack in a gas station when I’m twelve years old, and see Doom facing insurmountable odds and pushing on anyway, never mind the damage, never mind the price, then I honestly kind of doubt I make it through to eighteen. Every time the world and situations got too heavy, I would just dial back in my head to a certain page from Secret Wars, where Doom, final girl-style, is insisting on his own life, and I would find a way through.
FICTION
My Heart is a Chainsaw
By Stephen Graham Jones
Gallery/Saga Press
Published August 31, 2021
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