My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #1)

by Stephen Graham Jones

Proofrock, Idaho, and the dark body of water before them is Indian Lake,

God smiles on drunks and Indians.

Indigenous Peoples

when there are no more frontiers, you have to make them yourself,

George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher from the first part of the twentieth century. He also famously said that history is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren’t there.”

Religious text

Look to the Inca, say. Not the Inca as they were when the Spanish blundered into the Andes, but as that empire had been rising and falling for millennia, all on their own.

whose technological sophistication rivaled and surpassed any of their contemporaries across the globe, they eventually achieved a level of social stratification that essentially deified the ruling class, the wealthiest of the wealthy,

the mother rabbit will stand up to the snake or the coyote or the hawk when it’s after her baby rabbit, will stand up to them when she doesn’t have even one chance in all of hell at fighting off this perfect predator, but she throws her little body into those claws and fangs all the same and kicks for all she’s worth, for all her baby’s worth to her, which is… everything?

there WEREN'T supposed to be any Shoshone still going free range. But Idaho's a big [bleeping] place,

Giallo is like a proto slasher. It is to the slasher what dinosaurs are to birds.

Parents are good, parents are shining and right, they’re the gods of our world, so whatever they do can never be wrong.

Usually in slashers, the black girls are the friends—Scream 2, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. And that they’re in part 2’s means they’re a response, a bandaid.

Or a Hollywood token…

Black slasher—Candyman, Jimmy Bones, Machete Joe—but

When the bodies are accumulating, there’s always room for one more, right?