My Heart Is a Chainsaw

My Heart Is a Chainsaw is a horror novel by the American writer Stephen Graham Jones, published in 2021 and the first book of The Indian Lake Trilogy. The Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel went to it in 2021, and it engages closely with the slasher film genre, both quoting it and taking it apart.

Jade Daniels knows more about slasher films than anyone else in Proofrock, Idaho, which is why she recognises the shape of what is happening when the town starts losing people. Two Dutch tourists are killed while swimming in Indian Lake, and a phone of theirs is left behind in the canoe without anyone noticing. The lake is an artificial reservoir with the remains of a settlement beneath its surface.

The town has the right ingredients for the pattern Jade has spent her life studying: the lake, an old summer camp where a massacre took place fifty years earlier, and a new luxury development cutting into the national forest. Nobody else is treating any of it as a pattern, so Jade's knowledge is both her advantage and the reason nobody listens. The novel is written partly in her voice and partly in the school essays she writes about the films.

The trilogy continues in the two later books, and the first volume establishes Proofrock, the lake and Jade herself.