My Heart is a Chainsaw (Saga Press, August 2021)

It’s frequently very satisfying to get advance proofs of major titles long before they hit bookstores. If you’re lucky, you can get a heads up on the year’s most important releases before virtually anyone else, and you can enjoy watching the buzz steadily build.

I was lucky enough to get a copy of My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones back in March — hot on the heels of his 2020 breakout novel The Only Good Indians, which James McGlothlin said was “packed with wallops of horrific fright… a top-notch horror novel.” And I just fell in love with the premise: a disaffected teen and lover of slasher films sees a chillingly familiar pattern in a series of horrific local deaths, and tries in vain to warn her home town what is coming. Kirkus calls it “Extraordinary… an essential purchase,” and Polygon proclaims it “An intense homage to the classic horror films of yore.” Here’s a snippet from the starred review at Publisher’s Weekly.

Jones (The Only Good Indians) expertly mixes the frightening and the funny in this no-holds-barred homage to classic horror tropes written under the heady influence of splatter films. Its outsider heroine is Jade Daniels, an affectionately cheeky 17-year-old high schooler of Blackfoot descent, who finds escape from her dead-end life in rural Proofrock, Idaho, by gorging on a steady diet of slasher flicks. When a spate of bizarre deaths targeting the wealthy residents of Proofrock’s newly developed Terra Nova community rocks the town, Jade recognizes all of the elements of her favorite films’ formulae at play… the tension builds to a graphic finale perfectly appropriate for the novel’s cinematic scope. Horror fans won’t need to have seen all of the films referenced to be blown away by this audacious extravaganza.

My Heart is a Chainsaw will be published by Saga Press on August 31, 2021. It is 416 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital formats.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming fantasy and horror releases here.