Tangled up in Gore A Review of My Heart is a Chainsaw

 

So, it's been 24 hours since I finished reading My Heart is a Chainsaw and I still don't know what to say. I'm still processing it. I'll say some piddly things to see if my mind starts to work.

A) If Jade was a real teenage girl and not fictional, she should grow up to be a writer. Her essays are a hoot.
B) Stephen Graham Jones grew up to be a writer so he could write for Jade. The world has a way of working things out.
C) You do not want to be an elk in a Jones novel. I think an elk must have frightened him as a child and he's never forgiven it. We've got another pile of elk in this book, but in a completely different piled up way.

Now that I've warmed up, here's the review.  To me, the best horror is psychological horror where we don't know if the bizarre happenings are happening or if the protagonist's mental state is questionable.  We know Jade had a terrible childhood, is still with the father who caused the terrible childhood, is disliked and ignored at school (after being out of class for six weeks, the other students didn't notice she was back,) and doesn't see a way out. She immerses herself in slasher films and slasher lore as an outlet.  But, she is incredibly intelligent which only her history teacher and the town's sheriff seem to notice.
Some reviewers have said they're confused. I think we're meant to question what's going on, to see what we want to see. Is there a supernatural killer, a killer at all, or has Jade slipped into her own fantastical slasher world? And the ending ending, the one that follows the gory grand finale, is not something we saw coming at all. Yet, the unusual ending makes perfect sense because it tells us what Jade wanted all along. 

The main thing I like about the two books I've read by Stephen Graham Jones is that they're literary novels that happen to be horror. They're not like the pulpy horror books where you kind of know what will happen before it happens. There's a lot to ponder in this novel. I'll probably be thinking about it for a long time.