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

like she’s about to just collapse into a girl-shaped column of tears and wishes.

Quid pro quo, Clarice.”

.

“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.

Real final girls only want the horror to be over. They don’t stay up late praying to Craven and Carpenter to send one of their savage angels down, just for a weekend maybe. Just for one night. Just

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.

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--

“Horror’s not a symptom, it’s a love affair.”

But the cracks are where bugs like me live,

“The one horror genre you never broached in your papers and essays and creative pieces. How it was no accident that you avoided it.”

“I’m talking about rape-revenge, Jennifer.”

“And you’re saying that this woman, she becomes the spirit of vengeance personified,”

“if you say it’s from a different shelf altogether, then you’re saying that the crime itself doesn’t warrant revenge, aren’t you? That rape gets a pass. That sexual violation isn’t beholden to the scales of justice you’re always talking about, is somehow outside its purview.”

“Either that or you’re acknowledging that a minor can’t take that revenge,” Mr. Holmes adds, quieter. Because this is where he was going all along.

“The reason rape-revenge isn’t a slasher is that the slasher and the final girl would have to be the same person,”

“Problem with that is that the final girl and the spirit of vengeance are forever locked in opposition, not the same jumpsuit. That’d— that’d be like Batman peeling his cowl off and being the Joker. Would that even work?”

I think the slasher’s life of revenge is a life of pain and misery, and the slasher knows that no ordinary person can end that.

Kill the storytellers, kill the story.

“will she or won’t she . . . be a grandma before she’s thirty. The doctor was—was to see if he’d gotten me preg-preg—or not.”

she’s already staring at Jade,

but it can’t be,

she’s not a final girl . . . she hasn’t been a virgin for six years now, almost seven. But she’s the only one left who can do this, isn’t she? The only one who can stand against the slasher? Is she the final girl? Jade shakes her head no, but Stacey Graves lived before movies, lived before John Carpenter and Wes Cra...

Instead, Jade takes the handle of the machete in both hands, knows this is a one-shot-only thing, and slices from right to left with everything she’s been holding inside for the last six years, with every ounce of anger and rejection, all the unfairness and resentment, and she hears herself screaming exactly like a

final girl when she does it, and it’s not even on purpose, it’s just coming, it’s pure rage,

she’s finally turning around to fight, is insisting on her own life, is refusing to die, isn’t going to take even one more moment of abuse,

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.