My Heart Is a Chainsaw
By: Stephen Graham Jones / Narrated By: Cara Gee
Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
Loved the concept, despaired with execution (No pun intended… sorta…), kinda a mixed bag…
I soooo loved what author Stephen Graham Jones did with Mapping the Interior that I was really looking forward to My Heart is a Chainsaw even tho’ I’m hopeless when it comes to stories with an Unreliable Narrator, taking heroes/heroines very much at face value.
17-year old Jennifer “Jade” Daniels readily had m’ heart at: One scarred-up arm/Suicide attempt under her belt; but was this only one incident in a life already soooo marred by agony and mental instability?
Slasher movies are her Life’s blood, and the book opens with self-mutilation run amok after spouting off about them (Slasher pics) to a disparate group of young men, frigid weather, angst-y conversation setting the scene. And the story is set up between alternating events and School Reports to her History teacher. After said suicide attempt through cutting and a freezing lake keeps her in an institution for many weeks, Jade has makeup work to complete, History being the one class where she wasn’t allowed to slide. As it turns out? Even History can be twisted and morphed to suit her, well, NOT a preoccupation but MORE obsession. Every holiday, every occasion can be a foray into the history of slasher flicks. From the golden age of horror comes her golden homilies re: All things death and mayhem.
With such a mindset, back at school for her Senior year, she discovers that the new girl is complete and utter perfection: Letha is The PERFECT Final Girl: She who is victimized throughout the film and who goes on to morph into the Final Girl who takes on the slasher, who wins in the end.
And Letha MUST win because Jade’s indifferent town of Proofrock is currently on the way to becoming a horror show that will play out on July 4th. Jade is ON it, collating all the data that Letha will need to overcome a villain set on revenge: All the signs to watch out for, a tape of a slasher pic that will show each step The Final Girl must take, how she must morph to win at the end.
Unfortunately for Jade, Letha compassionately views The Final Girl info as a Cry For Help and narcs Jade out to the town Lawman and with her History teacher as backup (History teacher has ooooodles of papers on Jade’s Obsession). There’s an Intervention, they each want to help her, if she would juuuuuust come clean about the circumstances in Jade’s life, of WHY as just a kid she had to have her stomach pumped after an OD on aspirin.
Current circumstances? Jade’s a half-Indian teenager with an absent mother and a perpetually drunk and abusive dad. She’s a pariah at school where she also has a part-time job as custodial staff. She has poor impulse control, and when she interacts with others, her dialogue is peppered with slasher quotes and allusions to various films. She’s on the ball all right, but it’s a verrrry twisted and unstable ball.
And oh? No one pays attention to her, so author SGJ has her character spouting the SAME stuff rePEATedly throughout over 12-hours of audiobook. Keep in mind that my introduction to him had him knocking m’ socks off at just over a brisk 2-hours, and p’raps you can see why, tho’ I REFUSE to not finish an audiobook to be reviewed, I sooo was THAT Close to Giving Up.
But as mayhem starts to erupt, and as the body count goes up, SGJ manages to pick up the speed to a Fraught-er Than Heck bloodbath by the end. MOST Entertaining! Plus through the narrative’s development, we see Jade so touched by certain situations that she’s moved to hot tears of compassion, hot tears of sorrow, thus fleshing her out so that we’re somewhat drawn into: WHY is she the way she is?
Cara Gee, tho’ unknown to me, does a pretty bang-up job with portraying a huge amount of characters, each of whom gets plenty of air time. There are plenty of male characters that do NOT sound weird, and dude! is there action to relay, or what?! Narration was pretty decent, tho’ not entirely stellar. But Gee did what she could for the material, how many hours of it, the MANY hours of it, the oh-gosh-we’re-still-here HOURS of it.
The audiobook had me by the end, thus showing SGJ at his best with the aforementioned denouement as dead elk become maggot-ridden and jaws are ripped off and chests are ground open so that hearts might be grasped. There was the whole Whom Can Jade Trust issue, and there were plenty of well-loved characters for the listener to think: Gee I dooo hope s/he isn’t going to be one of the people who are brutally slaughtered and all that.
A jolly good Listen, it’s just that things got sooo repetitive there in the sagging middle part of the narrative, as tho’ SGJ was saying: See? I watched, like, EVERY. Single. Slasher Pic out there!!! Yes, you did, sir, but oy it made m’ head hurt.
Another faaairly solid way to bring Halloween and Native American Heritage Month together, tho’ I think next year I’ll be Googling the bejesus outta the place to find more horror/twisted offerings from different Indigenous authors. Tommy Orange can spin a good yarn, and gosh! Waubgeshig Rice creeped me out.
I shall wait patiently… I THINK I can do that…
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.