Oh dear. How was this book not for me? Horror? Yes please. Homage to slasher movies? Yes please.
A girl with a fascination of slasher flicks who believes a slasher is coming to her home town? Yes. Yes please to all of it.

The spiel sounded so good. Sounded like so much fun. The experience was far from it.

The book is extremely slow. Mind numbingly so. Very long chapters with walls of text as we spend time in our main protagonists mind. References to slasher movies which are fun at the start but, nearly every second page has a reference to them and it soon becomes old.
Things move at a snails pace as Jade goes about her day with a combination of imagining herself in a slasher movie and trying to figure out what may be coming. Her every thought is put down on the page, just page after page of not a hell of a lot. Two thirds of this book are mind numbingly boring and slow in the extreme.

It does ramp up for the final act but at that stage you really dont care what happens.

At over 400 pages, it honestly felt twice as long. As I said a great premise that somehow missed the mark and missed it in a big way.

If you are a fan of horror I think you will be disappointed with this one. Honestly it really isn’t worth the effort.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC through Netgalley.

I received an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and publisher Titan Books in exchange for an honest review.

I go back and forth on Stephen Graham Jones as an author and sadly, this was one of the misses for me. I am giving it 3 stars because I think a lot of the reasons it wasn't for me are just personal, and I definitely urge you to give it a try if you like his other work.

My Heart is a Chainsaw is the story of Jade, a teenage girl obsessed with horror films. When a new girl arrives at her school, Jade dubs her 'a Final Girl' and becomes excited that a real-life slasher event is about to begin. The story mostly focuses on Jade trying to determine the nature of the slasher she's in while she copes with finishing school and other aspects of her unhappy home life.

I got about 40% of the way through this book before giving up and skipping to the last 20%. I enjoyed it immensely at first, but there was just too much unfocused rambling and not enough plot happening for me. Normally I love character-focused books (especially with horror) but the writing style made it hard to tell what was going on, something I've struggled with from this author in the past. I liked the elements of horror tropes that were brought up and discussed, but I think the interesting parts did get bogged down by the writing.

Overall, I think if you've enjoyed other stuff by this author then this is definitely worth a try. I loved The Only Good Indians but I think I will stick to trying the shorter works from now on. For me, this book had some great ideas and a lot of promise in the plot, I just sadly didn't gel with the execution.

Overall Rating: 3/5

My Heart is a Chainsaw is a treasure chest of delights for any horror film fan. It was jam-packed with references to the slasher genre, and while some of the films mentioned were quite well known, others were very niche. As someone who has had a lifelong obsession with these types of films, the rarer mentions gave an extra layer of enjoyment.

Some parts of the story were just perfect whereas some parts were harder to read emotionally - using the horror genre and its tropes to talk about loneliness and isolation - what it's like to always be on the outside and how people's prejudices can affect you. The main character, Jade, lives alone with her abusive father after her mother abandoned them. She is half Indian and as she has grown up she has felt more and more like an outcast amongst her peers. Jade is convinced that her small town is going to become the set of a real-life slasher film and through a series of school reports, she documents the way she sees things going based on her knowledge of these films.

At first it seems like she is just a young girl who is obsessed with horror films, preferring to talk about these than the work she is supposed to be doing at school. As the story continues, it becomes clear that she deconstructs horror films and looks at the messages behind them as a way of dealing with the injustice against her and the issues in her town - using it as a way to escape and deal with emotions she has no other way of expressing.

There are so many layers to this book and I'm sure everyone will take something different from it. I have never read a book that looks at Native American culture before (The Only Good Indians by the same author is now high up on my list!) and found it really interesting, especially as this was woven in with horror elements. The intense opening and end scenes were like nothing I've ever read and it really took some time to process after I finished the book. With all of the horror film references it might be that this story is lost on some people, but for me it was a complete surprise, challenging, dark and passionate - I loved it.

Wow. This book ended up resonating with a lot more than I originally thought it would. This is not an easy book to read. It's not fast or pleasant or forgiving. Stephen Graham Jones demands participation from his readers, but in the best way. Set in a small town and told from the perspective of a young half-native woman who is obsessed both with slasher films and with her place in a real-life horror, My Heart is a Chainsaw explores how we cling to the things we can control, the things we can expect, when our own lives seem to be spiraling away. What if our horrors could be predictable? What if we could prepare ourselves for the worst? What if life was a slasher film?

Not only is the horror in this book a perfect mixture of slasher and psychological, but it's emotional as well. The horror Jade experiences, in her head and in real life, are so incredibly tangible that I never quite knew what to believe or to expect. It is through Jade's experiences with horror and her obsession with slasher films that we come to understand her, little by little, even though she's a reluctant narrator. And it's there, with Jade's reluctance yet ever-encompassing need, where Jones' talent as a writer truly shines. Jade is a complete character, even if she herself never realizes it.

This is a book that will sit with for a long time as I contemplate both its horrors and its joys.

The prolonged setup truly kept me guessing. I never knew how the book would turn out which is in itself a good thing. I'm not thrilled with the twist but can't imagine a way for it to be written with anyone else fulfilling that role. I also felt a little lost at times and had to reread sections to make sure I hadn't missed anything. This is my first SGJ book and I'm looking forward to more of his.