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

by Stephen Graham Jones

The slasher film lies by and large beyond the purview of the respectable —Carol J. Clover

“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.

“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.”

Stacey Stacey Stacey Graves Born to put you in your grave You see her in the dark of night And once you do you’re lost from sight Look for water, look for blood Look for footprints in the mud You never see her walk on grass Don’t slow down, she’ll get your--

“That’s just me,” Jade tells him, blowing her smoke out now, as underline. “Horror’s not a symptom, it’s a love affair.”

If nobody knows the story about your big wonderful house, then it can just keep on being big and wonderful, can’t it? Kill the storytellers, kill the story.

This mother’s saying that if this bad man wants her baby, then he’s gonna have to come through her to get it, and Jade has to look up to the sky to keep her eyes from spilling, and for a moment the smoke parts enough for a grainy line of sunlight to filter through, find the palm of her hand when she reaches up to try to hold this feeling for as long as she can.