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

by Stephen Graham Jones

She falls back, almost over the side, when Sven starts screaming. In Dutch, in English, in human, except more primal—the way you only ever scream once, Lotte knows.

“You said this place was haunted,” Shooting Glasses tells her. “By all the ghosts of who everybody used to want to be, before they died inside,” Jade says.

Final girls are good, they’re uncomplicated, they have these reserves of courage coiled up inside them, not layer after layer of shame, or guilt, or whatever this festering poison is.

To put it in conclusion, sir, final girls are the vessel we keep all our hope in. Bad guys don't just die by themselves, I mean. Sometimes they need help in the form of a furie running at them, her mouth open in scream, her eyes white hot, her heart forever pure.

Jade tells herself that, should that happen, she won’t be one of those simpletons grubbing for outflung pennies, but, at the same time, she one hundred percent knows that it’s easy to be aloof when those pennies aren’t in play yet.

“The saying is actually ‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ ”

“It’s from 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.”

Jade closes her eyes again, harder. Reminds herself that with every good, there’s two bads. That’s just the way it is. Maybe it’s a thing with Indians, or maybe it’s just her, it doesn’t really matter. True’s true.

This is what she’ll remember, she knows. That she wasn’t the only one at this laughable, embarrassing event who would rather have burned it all down. It’s good being the horror chick, sure, always standing away from the rest of the crowd, smoking bitter cigarette after bitter cigarette, she’d have it no other way, but it’s nice to make eye contact with someone else with a black heart, too, and then breathe smoke out slow, like judgment.

And, okay, she does know which came first: the slasher, of course. It rises to right the wrongs, then when it gets all carried away, nature spits up its governor, its throttle, its one-woman police force, its fiercest angel: the final girl. She’s the only cap the slasher cycle recognizes.

One thing Mr. Holmes told the class one wistful seventh period was that nobody ever makes it past twenty with the same hopes and dreams and certainties they once thought so dear and vital and true at seventeen. Nobody except me, Jade had assured herself, but she’d also had to wonder if that was even a partially original thought—if every other student in history class that day wasn’t thinking the exact same thing.

Except Letha’s own words are echoing: this is the real world, not a movie, and the real world doesn’t have to follow any special rules. It just does what it does. You can’t pick your genre, no. Has that been what Jade’s been doing all along? Trying to shape an unwieldy string of dead people into a movie, just so she can have a minor role? So she can feel some sense of control? If so, all her slasher homework has just been to delude herself, not to live through this night. Or, if she does live, then she lives knowing that there never was any slasher cycle, that slashers aren’t real, are just pretend, and what kind of life would that be?