My Heart Is a Chainsaw
by Stephen Graham Jones
Summary
Jade Daniels is seventeen, half Blackfeet, all alone, and armored in slashers: the final girls, the rules, the kill counts, the entire canon from Friday the 13th sequels to obscurities, which she has metabolized into a private religion and a series of extra credit essays for a bemused history teacher, essays the novel reprints between chapters as Jade's slasher gospel. Her town is Proofrock, Idaho, on Indian Lake, across the water from Terra Nova, where billionaires are building gated compounds on ground with history, and when bodies start accumulating, Dutch tourists first, then closer, Jade alone recognizes the shape: a slasher cycle has begun, and she knows the genre's liturgy by heart.
The joke that stops being a joke is that Jade cannot be the final girl, wrong race, wrong reputation, wrong wounds, so she appoints one: Letha Mondragon, newcomer, beautiful, kind, structurally perfect, and spends the novel trying to train her for a massacre nobody else believes is coming. Under the film scholarship, Jones builds the real horror with terrible patience: Jade's home, her father, the thing her encyclopedic deflections are encyclopedic about not saying, so that when the Independence Day massacre finally arrives on the lake, screen violence and lived violence collapse into each other, and the girl who studied survival has to perform it.
The prose is Jade's voice throughout, wounded, hilarious, obsessive.
Around four hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the slasher simultaneously celebrated, dissected and grieved, with a heroine the genre had never made room for.
Historical Context & Significance
My Heart Is a Chainsaw won the Bram Stoker Award for 2021, giving Stephen Graham Jones consecutive novel wins, a feat previously managed only by Robert R. McCammon and Peter Straub, and confirming the commercial arrival of the Indigenous horror wave his previous book had crested: this one opened the Indian Lake Trilogy, whose sequels, Don't Fear the Reaper and The Angel of Indian Lake, completed a final girl arc for Jade across three massacres.
The novel's mode, metafictional devotion, the genre loved so hard the love becomes structure, drew the Scream comparisons it invites and outruns; academic writing on the book, and there is a growing shelf, centers Jade as a rereading of the final girl through race, class and abuse, the trope's exclusions made the subject.
Jones's Buffalo Hunter Hunter, the 2025 winner elsewhere on this list, extended the streak that makes him the award's dominant contemporary figure.