My Heart Is a Chainsaw

My Heart Is a Chainsaw is a novel by Stephen Graham Jones, published in 2021. Jones is a Blackfoot Indigenous American author of speculative fiction and horror fiction. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is the first book in the Indian Lake Trilogy, a series about a slasher-obsessed part Indigenous American teenage girl named Jade Daniels in the fictional town of Proofrock, Idaho. It won the 2021 Bram Stoker Award for best horror novel. The sequel, Don’t Fear the Reaper, was published in 2023, and the final installment of the trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake, is anticipated in 2024. My Heart Is a Chainsaw introduces Jade Daniels’s coming-of-age journey against the backdrop of a series of violent murders that plague her small community. While Jade sees herself as a social outcast, her encyclopedic knowledge of 1980s slasher movies means that she is the only person who realizes the true nature of these crimes: A masked killer is on a quest for revenge.

This guide refers to the edition published in 2021 by Saga Press.

Content Warning: This novel includes depictions of death by suicide, child sexual abuse, rape, murder, and debilitating alcohol addiction. It also discusses bigotry and violence against Indigenous Americans.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a scene where Sven and Lotte, two young Dutch tourists driving across America, stop at the shores of Indian Lake in Proofrock, Idaho. The couple sees strange lights across the water and decides to strip down to take a nighttime boat ride in a canoe they find at the end of the dock. However, their canoe strays into a patch of water covered in rotting meat and hair. Sven is pulled under, and Lotte is killed shortly after, her phone remaining to record the sounds of their screams.

The narrative shifts to the perspective of Jade Daniels, a part Indigenous American 17-year-old girl who loves slasher movies and lives with her abusive father, Tab Daniels. After Tab and his friend Rexall make fun of her badly dyed hair, Jade runs away on the freezing cold night of “Friday the 13th.” Without anywhere else to go, she finds a trash fire at the construction grounds for a new, expensive housing development being built across the lake called Terra Nova. Jade works there as a janitor and recounts to the construction workers how she identifies with the murderous groundskeeper Cropsy in the 1981 film The Burning. She calls one worker Shooting Glasses because he wears yellow aviators. When he offers to drive her home (in a car hinted to be Lotte and Sven’s abandoned vehicle), Jade instead runs away and cuts her wrists in the town canoe.

Eight weeks later, Jade returns to finish her last few weeks of high school. She discovers that a new student from Terra Nova has transferred to the school—Letha Mondragon—and Jade decides that Letha perfectly fits the trope of the “final girl” who would survive in a horror movie. After discovering Lotte’s phone and the recording of her violent death, Jade becomes convinced that a real slasher story is about to unfold in her hometown. She decides that Letha Mondragon will probably be the one to defeat the killer and so she is responsible for preparing Letha to fulfill this role by educating her in the tropes of horror.

Because Jade has missed a lot of school, the novel includes interludes written as extra-credit papers to her teacher, Mr. Holmes, which explain the history and narrative conventions of slasher movies. Based on this expertise in the horror genre, Jade begins to investigate the deaths around Proofrock. She develops two theories: firstly, that they are supernatural murders committed by the urban legend “Lake Witch” Stacey Graves, or, secondly, that they are connected to the rich families referred to as the Founders who are moving into the new Terra Nova housing development.

During her investigation, Jade is forced to confront her past when Letha begins to suspect that Jade’s father sexually abused her and reports this theory to Sheriff Hardy and Mr. Holmes. Jade tries to avoid this subject, preferring to focus on preparing Letha to be the hero she knows she is meant to become. Soon, rich Founder Deacon Samuels, who persuaded investors to purchase Terra Nova, is found supposedly killed by a bear, and the former boyfriend of the sheriff’s dead daughter dies in a boating accident. Jade speculates that perhaps Mr. Holmes and Sheriff Hardy are also involved with the murders. However, Jade realizes that Letha’s father, Theo Mondragon, is the masked killer when she witnesses him attempting to kill the construction workers at Terra Nova with a nail gun, likely to cover up the fact that they witnessed him shoot down Mr. Holmes’s ultralight aircraft over his yacht. After the other Founders are murdered that night on their yacht, Jade and Letha escape into the woods. They hide in a pile of elk carcasses before fleeing and trying to get to the town’s annual Fourth of July movie celebration on the lake to avert a massacre.

During the movie, both Theo Mondragon and Stacey Graves are revealed to be the killers—Theo murdering the construction workers with the nail gun and Stacey Graves returning from the dead to punish the townspeople for disturbing her resting place. With Letha injured, Jade is the one who must defeat Stacey Graves, saving the town. However, she also murders her father during the chaos, acknowledging that he raped her when she was a child. After realizing that she was caught on camera, Jade flees into the woods, opening the dam to flood the town and prevent it from being consumed by a forest fire.