My Heart Is a Chainsaw (Compact Disc)

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My Heart Is a Chainsaw By Stephen Graham Jones, Cara Gee (Read by) Cover Image
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Staff Reviews


** The Snail is pleased to have some special bonuses to deliver along with this new book.**

Heartbreaking, dripping in gore, life-affirming, nasty, and sweet, My Heart Is a Chainsaw had me from the first thirty pages and didn't stop. You’ll be terrified to turn the page, but so invested in the story that you can’t help but do just that. Jade is a half-Indian teenager with an axe to grind nearly as big as Jack Torrance's literal one. She's obsessed with slasher flicks, and when a new girl and her wealthy family arrive in town, Jade is certain she has glimpsed an incredible omen to a bloody and exciting summer: an actual Final Girl in the flesh. People start dying, and violently. Are their deaths horrible coincidences? Or is something more sinister stalking the town? 

Especially for lovers of slow-burn horror and horror movies (there are lots of pop culture references!), anyone with a love of camp, fans of Stephen King
(Note on content: sexual abuse, graphic violence, animal cruelty)
— Whitney Sheppard, Snail Readers Circle

September 2021 Indie Next List


“Jade isn’t the final girl; she doesn’t fit the requirements for a typical slasher flick. When her town becomes the setting for a real-life slasher case, she fills the role of wise woman to the appropriate final girl.”
— April Gosling, Boulder Book Store, Boulder, CO

Description


In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.Some girls just don't know how to die... Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called a literary master by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and one of our most talented living writers by Tommy Orange. Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre. On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life. Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies...especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold. Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges...a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.


Product Details
ISBN: 9781797123349
ISBN-10: 1797123343
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication Date: August 31st, 2021
Language: English