Anyway, I guess I’m in here pretending like a lightbulb just went off randomly in my head, and standing in that glowing cone was Jade. Wrong. What happened was I’d written that first, broken version of a slasher set around Indian Lake, but swirling it all around this kid in the iron mask wasn’t working. I thought the story was hopeless, was all shine, no substance. But then—and I can’t find this article, don’t want to search for it either—I stumbled onto a read about a young Native girl in Arizona who had killed herself after being molested by her (Native) father. I distinctly remember reading that article over and over, trying to make it make sense. It wouldn’t, though. But whoever had written it had done their research, pulled in the statistics, and… this girl was alone, yes, but she also wasn’t. The numbers for this happening among Indian communities was higher than it was anywhere else.
I won’t lie that I crumpled that article up, dropped it in the trash, and opened up a new file to do this novel right. But I did now have someone to write against: that father who was never a dad. And all I had to do then was let Jade stand up from the shallows by the pier, look around for who was first on her list, here. The only real guide I had for that was Mona Simpson’s story “Lawns,” which David Kirby selected as the one story his grad class would read over and over for a semester. So, thank you, David Kirby and Mona Simpson. And also, for damming up Indian Lake, Tony Earley—the dam in his “The Prophet from Jupiter” story is the first and only literary dam, for me, and, if I’m being honest, I think that story’s where I found Hardy. Well, there and The Howling. There’s also a poem in that old anthology Vital Signs that’s important to Indian Lake—well, to Jade being Jade—but it’ll be more important later, so maybe I’ll remember to say something about it then. And thanks as well to an English teacher I had my senior year at Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas, a teacher whose name I don’t remember, since I only went to one day of my senior year. But that one day I went, you had a broken leg from a motorcycle accident, and you also had a… I don’t know, a kind of glitter or humor to your eyes that reminded me of Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati, and I knew that if I stayed in your class, you would recognize me, the real me, you’d see past the ripped jeans, the rattlesnake earring, the skunk stripe in my hair. And so I quit, I left, I ran away. But I went back and let Jade stay, and that means a lot to me. It means everything, sir. You were there for her, I mean, when no one else was. Thank you for that.
And, of course, thank you forevermuch to Carol J. Clover, for mapping out the final girl for all of us. And thank you to Kevin Williamson for giving her the perfect story to run through. And thanks to Ryan Van Cleave, for knocking on my apartment door over winter break in January 1997 in Tallahassee, Florida, and making me go see this movie he said I had to see. I didn’t want to go, I wanted to write instead, but you insisted, man, so I did. That movie was Scream. I was there on my own the next six nights in a row, soaking it in. I could feel the folds in my brain shifting, writhing, grinning. All the homework I’d been doing my whole life, it was suddenly worth it.
And—Wes Craven. I don’t take many selfies, at least not on purpose, but one I did take, and still have, is of me in a Ghostface mask in 2015 in Salt Lake City, Utah, the day Wes Craven died. There’s a reason My Heart Is a Chainsaw is set when it is, I mean.
Thank you, Mr. Craven.
You changed my world in 1984, and you changed it again in 1996. I wouldn’t be the same without you.
And, Chainsaw, it wouldn’t be the same without my champion of an editor, Joe Monti. Him and the whole Saga and Simon & Schuster team: Lisa Litwack, for the amazing cover, and all the hard work to get to that cover; Sherry Wasserman and Dave Cole, for saving my life in copyediting; Jaime Putorti, for designing this amazing interior; Kaitlyn Snowden, production manager, for keeping all the wheels turning; Madison Penico, for keeping versions straight, for keeping the manuscript sensible, for keeping all my paperwork in order, which I could never do alone; Caroline Pallotta, Allison Green, and Iris Chen, in managing editorial; and Jennifer Bergstrom, publisher, Jennifer Long, associate publisher, and Sally Marvin, VP of publicity and marketing—there couldn’t be a better team. And thanks to Lauren Jackson, the most amazing marketing and publicity magician, statistician, and make-it-happen-inator I’ve ever worked with. But, Joe Monti: it would have been so easy for him to make me resculpt this novel such that Jade being Blackfeet would be instrumental instead of incidental. But Joe never even considered that, I don’t think. Instead he did what good editors do: he crawled inside the story, looked around at what it was trying to do, and offered up a list of ways it could do that better. He got Chainsaw in order, I mean, the same as he’d done with The Only Good Indians, once upon a fairy tale. And the story, it just… it started locking in place. It was all I could do to write fast enough to keep up. You remember in Cat’s Cradle, how all the water turns to ice-nine? That’s what happened with My Heart Is a Chainsaw, after I touched Joe’s notes to the manuscript.
Thanks, Joe Monti. You saved me again.
Here’s to many more saves.
I just searched my inbox, too. My search was “Lake Access Only,” Chainsaw’s old title. The first time it shows up is July 15, 2010. It’s second in a stack of four titles I thought it might be fun to write into slashers some fine day.
This is that day.
Again, thank you, reader, for coming all the way out to Indian Lake with me, where the air’s thin and the water red, and thank you to my two kids, Rane and Kinsey, for always watching slashers with me and talking slashers and dressing up as slashers. It’s meant the world, y’all. I treasure it like nothing else. No dad’s ever been so lucky as I am, getting to watch you grow up. And, thank you to my wife, Nancy. Back when I was writing Demon Theory in 1999—my first slasher—the video rental places in Lubbock, Texas, would always do 99-cent horror movies, and I’d come back with a stack of Jason and Michael and Freddy tapes night after night, but I would always be too scared to watch them on my own. This was the first house we lived in, remember? Your grandparents’ old house. I have such a distinct memory of standing in their doorway and meeting them in 1991 and looking past them to the console television with Lawrence Welk playing. Eight years later, it was you and me there, Nan, and the television was in the same place, only, instead of Lawrence Welk, it was chainsaws and machetes, masks and screaming, and me in a chair soaking it all in until the small hours, and you, who had to get up at five in the morning to work the payment window at the power company, sleeping on the old couch in the glow of that television, sleeping there because you knew I wouldn’t be safe with all this scary stuff alone.
Thank you, Nancy, for keeping me safe all those nights. I think the only time I haven’t been wrong was when I said to you that maybe we could make a life together, and grow old holding each other’s hand.
My heart is a chainsaw, yes, but you’re the one who starts it.
Stephen Graham Jones
Boulder, Colorado, USA
November 27, 2020
More from the Author
The Only Good Indians
Attack of the 50 Foot Indian
The Mythic Dream
Echoes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES is the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians. He has been an NEA Fellowship recipient; has won the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Book Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Bram Stoker Award, and four This Is Horror Awards; and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR:
SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Stephen-Graham-Jones
SimonandSchuster.com
SAGAPRESS.COM
@SagaPressBooks
@SagaSFF
ALSO BY STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
NOVELS
The Fast Red Road
All the Beautiful Sinners
The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto
Seven Spanish Angels
Demon Theory
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
Ledfeather
It Came from Del Rio
Zombie Bake-Off
Growing Up Dead in Texas
The Last Final Girl
The Least of My Scars
Flushboy
The Gospel of Z
Not for Nothing
Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (with Paul Tremblay)
Mongrels
The Only Good Indians
NOVELLAS
Sterling City
Mapping the Interior
Night of the Mannequins
SHORT STORIES AND COLLECTIONS
Three Miles Past
Attack of the 50 Foot Indian
Bleed into Me: A Book of Stories
The Ones That Got Away
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth
Three Miles Past
States of Grace
After the People Lights Have Gone Off
The Faster Redder Road
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen Graham Jones
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First Saga Press hardcover edition August 2021
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Interior design by Jaime Putorti
Jacket design by Lisa Litwack
Jacket photograph by Getty Images
Author photograph © Gary Isaacs
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jones, Stephen Graham, 1972– author.
Title: My heart is a chainsaw / Stephen Graham Jones.
Description: First Saga Press hardcover edition. | New York : Saga Press, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021014273 (print) | LCCN 2021014274 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982137632 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982137656 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3560.O5395 M92 2021 (print) | LCC PS3560.O5395 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014273
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014274
ISBN 978-1-9821-3763-2
ISBN 978-1-9821-3765-6 (ebook)
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 39