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Book Review: My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

cover art for My Heart Is A Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

Gallery/Saga Press, 2021

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982137632

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook (  Bookshop.org |  Amazon.com  )

 

 

Jade Daniels is part Blackfeet, but she’s 100% a fan of slasher movies. Living with her divorced, alcoholic father and barely scraping through high school while working as a janitor, where her drug-dealing boss is sexually harassing her, she spends most of her time watching slasher flicks, from the obscure to the popular. Without anyone to talk to about her love of these movies, she puts her energy and knowledge about them, and especially about final girls, in her extra-credit history papers. She is certain there’s a slasher ready to start on her own community, Proofrock, located in rural Idaho, if only she can identify the final girl and educate her. There are plenty of places that would make perfect locations and reasons for revenge, like Camp Blood, an abandoned summer camp on the lake that was closed after mysterious deaths, and Terra Nova, the new, exclusive development that’s being built on the opposite side of the lake on land that until recently was part of a national forest.  There are even spooky urban legends.

 

 

Then Jade meets Letha Mondragon, daughter of the developer of Terra Nova. She thinks she’s met her final girl, and that finally the bloodshed is about to start.  Jade just has to figure out where and why, and educate Letha on the ins and outs of surviving to be the final girl. Jade is about to discover, though, that life doesn’t always fit a pre-defined narrative.

 

My Heart is a Chainsaw is a love letter to the slasher genre and a validation for those who grew up loving it. If you aren’t a fan of slasher films, the references to even obscure slasher films will go over your head. The structure of the book means the narrative is frequently interrupted by Jade’s extra-credit papers on slasher films, which will help fill in the blanks for those who aren’t familiar with the genre, but while these build background knowledge, they do slow the narrative down. The characters aren’t especially likable and it’s sometimes even confusing to tell them apart. Jones doesn’t even name some of them, although when he does choose to develop a character he does it thoroughly.

 

As the reader gets further into the book the pace picks up and the body count rises. There are absolutely gruesome moments as well as plenty of gore. I do not have a strong stomach for these, so it’s a testament to Jones’ writing that I read this from beginning to end almost nonstop. Readers who love slasher films and have a high tolerance for violence and gore will find a lot to like in this bloody valentine.

 

Contains: violence, blood, gore, mass murder, sexual harassment, implied child sexual abuse, attempted suicide

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

Posted on November 25, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Don’t Turn Out the Lights: A Tribute to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark edited by Jonathan Maberry

cover art for Don't Turn Out The Lights: A Tribute to Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark edited by Jonathan Maberry  ( Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com )

Don’t Turn Out the Lights: A Tribute to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark edited by Jonathan Maberry

HarperCollins, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0062877673

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Don’t Turn Out the Lights is an anthology of stories by a variety of diverse horror writers, mostly of YA horror, inspired mainly by their nostalgia over Alvin Schwartz’s notable collections of urban legends and folktales, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (writers include Linda Addison, Amy Lukavics, Courtney Alameda, Tannarive Due, Kami Garcia, and R.L. Stine). Schwartz’s writing was spare, providing just the bare bones of the stories he shared, and Stephen Gammell provided terrifying black-and-white pen and pencil drawings to accompany each one It is unfortunate that the artist for the book is not credited, so far as I can tell. Nobody can be Stephen Gammell, but the interior illustrations suggest the artist studied his style. The artwork is outstanding and integrates well into the design of the book and the storytelling.

Unlike Schwartz’s collections, there aren’t a lot of jump-scares or gruesome rhymes: these are tribute stories rather than an attempt to recreate his work. As expected in a collection of 35 stories, each by a different author, some are better than others. Some stories stick closer to Schwartz’s style and choice of subject, with the feeling of a folktale, such as T.J. Wooldridge’s “The Skelly-Horse”, or “Jingle Jangle”, while others, like “The Funeral Portrait” were more reminiscent of Poe. A few manage to stick to the urban legend feel of the original while updating it for tweens today, like “Tag, You’re It,” by N.R. Lambert, which plays on social media anxieties, and “The House on the Hill”, which brings mystery emails and cell phones into play in a tale of peer pressure and surveillance in a haunted house. “The Neighbor” managed the fine line of evoking Schwartz’s tales in a contemporary context beautifully. Editor Jonathan Maberry’s introductory essay was very interesting, as he did not grow up with the stories but read them as an adult.

One of this book’s greatest faults is its length. The original Scary Stories books were relatively short in length, with plenty of white space and relatively large print on each page. Stories were usually very short and heavily illustrated. Don’t Turn Out the Lights is over 400 pages long, with most stories obviously intended to be read on the page instead of told at a campfire.  While the Scary Stories books are read by kids as young as third grade, the length of the book and of the stories suggests to me that Don’t Turn Out the Lights is aimed at a slightly older audience of tweens and middle-schoolers, and also the adult audience feeling the same kind of nostalgia for the Scary Stories books that the authors did. Recommended for grades 4+.

Contains: gore, violence, body horror, murder

 

NetGalley temporarily provided a review copy of this book.

 

Posted on September 30, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Rules for Vanishing by Kate Alice Marshall

Rules for Vanishing by Kate Alice Marshall

Viking Books for Young Readers, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1984837011

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

 

The legend of Lucy Gallows says that 12 year old Lucy Callow ran into the woods after an argument with her mother, and when her brother went after her, he saw her step onto a road, and as she walked away, both she and the road vanished, never to be found.

Sara Donoghue’s sister Becca was obsessed with the legend of Lucy Gallows, going so far as to fill a notebook with thoughts, drawings, photographs, and clues that could lead her to the vanished road and find Lucy.  A year ago, on April 18, Becca disappeared, and Sara is certain her sister found her way to the road. Now everyone in her school has received a text message to find a partner and a key to find the road by midnight. Anthony, Trina, Kyle, Mel and Nick were Becca and Sara’s closest friends, and despite doubts, all of them show up to see if the road appears. The road has seven gates, and you need a partner to hold on to as you take the thirteen necessary (and disorienting) steps through each gate.  Becca’s notebook contains rules for traveling on the road:

Don’t leave the road.

When it’s dark, don’t let go.

There are other roads. Don’t follow them.

The road does appear, but since three of the friends have shown up with partners for the game, there is an odd number, meaning someone won’t have a partner. And in the dark, it’s easy to get separated and accidentally step off the road. The teens are not on a friendly stroll here; they are on a terrible road with frightening and sometimes deadly obstacles, and once they’re through the gate, they can’t turn back. But they also can’t help breaking the rules. If the reader isn’t filled with dread at the beginning of their journey, it won’t take long for that to happen.

Marshall constructs her story in a complicated way. First, we get Sara’s relatively straightforward narrative, told entirely from her point of view.  Then we move to a point past the events on the road,  with transcripts from interviews with Sara, and others who were on the journey, by Andrew Ashford, a discredited researcher of the paranormal.  There’s also documentation of what happened before the teens stepped onto the road (through text messages between Sara’s friends) and while they were on it (cell phone recordings and videos, and photographs) suggesting that maybe Sara’s story is not as straightforward or reliable as it seems to be. Marshall balances these nicely to create a cohesive, if sometimes hallucinatory, story.   The creativity of the story and the work that goes in to structuring a book like this are impressive. I wasn’t a big fan of most of the characters, but the world-building is outstanding (although I am curious as to why the author chose to ground her story in a legend from Brittany when the book is set in Massachusetts), and the suspense is terrific.

I wonder if this is meant to stand alone (it certainly can) or if it’s meant to be part of a longer series about Andrew Ashford’s investigations of the paranormal, which I would find intriguing. Either way, for those who like the puzzle of pulling a story together, it’s a compelling and worthwhile read. Recommended.

Contains: Violence, gore,  murder

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note:  Rules for Vanishing was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Posted on March 31, 2020 by , Reply
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