Books › My Heart Is a Chainsaw
My Heart Is a Chainsaw
464 pages
A blood-soaked love letter to slasher films wrapped around a raw, beating heart of teenage trauma.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being trapped inside the frantic, encyclopedic mind of a deeply traumatized teenager who uses horror movies as a shield against a horrifying reality. The narrative voice is raw, obsessive, and darkly funny, pulling you through a slow-burn buildup of dread that eventually explodes into a spectacular, blood-soaked climax. It is a gritty, claustrophobic experience, steeped in the misty, oppressive atmosphere of a gentrifying mountain town where the past refuses to stay buried. The prose is a breathless stream of slasher trivia and defensive cynicism that slowly peels back to reveal profound vulnerability. It will absolutely delight die-hard horror fans who crave meta-commentary, but its true triumph is how deeply it makes you ache for its fierce, broken protagonist.
- Mood
- dread-soaked
- claustrophobic
- gritty
- bloody
- Tone
- obsessive
- cynical
- darkly comedic
- vulnerable
- frantic
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- trauma as a lens · adolescent alienation · class divide · the power of horror · marginalization
- The writing
- A breathless, encyclopedic stream of consciousness deeply embedded in the protagonist's frantic, horror-obsessed mind.
- The arc
- Moves from defensive, obsessive isolation into a harrowing, bloody confrontation with both literal monsters and deep-seated trauma.
- Who it's for
- Horror aficionados who love meta-commentary, slasher tropes, and deeply flawed, fiercely resilient outcast protagonists.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- gore
- child abuse
- past sexual assault
- racism
- animal death
About the book
You won’t find a more hardcore eighties-slasher-film fan than high school senior Jade Daniels. And you won’t find a place less supportive of girls who wear torn T-shirts and too much eyeliner than Proofrock, nestled eight thousand feet up a mountain in Idaho, alongside Indian Lake, home to both Camp Blood – site of a massacre fifty years ago – and, as of this summer, Terra Nova, a second-home celebrity Camelot being carved out of a national forest.
That’s not the only thing that’s getting carved up, though – this, Jade knows, is the start of a slasher. But what kind? Who’s wearing the mask? Jade’s got an encyclopedic recall of every horror movie on the shelf, but... will that help her survive? Can she get a final girl trained enough to stop all this from happening? Does she even want to?
Isn’t a slasher exactly what her hometown deserves?
Description from Open Library.
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