My Heart is a Chainsaw: a mixed review, spoilers

by janedotx7

Spoilers ahead.

I hear NPR described the author as one of our foremost talents today, and I cannot fucking believe that NPR thinks that, because that would mean putting My Heart is a Chainsaw on the same shelf as the Patrick Melrose novels. Like many other novels today, MHC is another tiresome book about trauma, written by someone who understands how it’s inflicted, what it’s like to live with the coping mechanisms adopted to numb oneself against it, but without much to say about it.

The protagonist, Jade, spends most of the book rambling about slasher trivia, even in the heat of the moment when she finally is being chased by an axe murderer, and half the chapters are papers about slasher movies that she wrote to her history teacher in an attempt for extra credit that he never gives. Here are samples: “Her lead-in example, and where she got the title, was that hurting the leg of a slasher, instead of slowing it down, it actually makes the slasher faster, just, now, it’s got a scary limp.” “Unless it’s the anthropophagus from 1980, of course. In which case she’s screwd, as she doesn’t think she can run right now.”

It’s fairly clear, even before the body count starts rising, that Jade’s incessant obsession with slasher films is escapism from some kind of trauma–and this is what makes me think that despite the glut of trauma stories we’ve seen on the market, maybe we need more, because from what I can tell, the book’s fans were all surprised by the reveal that Jade’s obsession with slasher films comes from hoping that a serial killer would put a chainsaw through her sexually abusive father’s head. You’d think that devotees of genre stories would’ve figured out by now that it’s called “escapism” because the goal is to escape from a disappointing reality, and the worse the reality, the more committed the escapism is. If you see the reveal coming though, the book doesn’t read as a tender exploration of how the horror genre can save a life, but instead, as one of those trauma plots (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot).

MCS is not a bad book, and it gets points for execution. Jade is tedious, unlikable, and so obsessed with slasher films that everyone in the book finds her offputting, but it’s psychologically true. Her problems are written in a way that ought to feel familiar to anyone who knows someone who’s undergone long, complex trauma, or anyone who has suffered it themselves. It’s normal to become oblivious to reality, distracted by the inability to stop replaying the same thoughts over and over, which does wonders for your social skills. Trauma survivors tend to be rigid thinkers, fixated on the few things that make them feel safe. The problem is that even though it made complete sense to me that Jade was trying to think of which slasher movie the axe murder chasing her reminded her of in medias res, it is a bad reading experience.

What’s most infuriating is that the attempt to resolve Jade’s trauma at the end of the book was narratively unsatisfying to me as well. Jade attacks her abusive father and while she doesn’t kill him, she does get the satisfaction of watching a girl she admires administer the coup de grace. She also stops the real murderer and saves the town, but Jade apparently gets no emotional satisfaction from that. Finally, she sees a literal mother bear protecting her cub from a papa bear, which…somehow makes up for her own mother not doing enough to protect Jade and vanishing from her life. Then the book ends.

To me, while the bear action reads well as a healing moment, it doesn’t really read as cathartic enough to be the ending. Throughout the book, Jade idolizes the beautiful and rich Letha Mondragon as the only possible girl who is pure, innocent, and determined enough to be a final girl. It’s quite clear that Jade thinks of herself as too worthless to be a final girl herself. While one piece of her trauma is the belief that no parent will ever protect their child, the other is the belief that she, specifically, does not deserve protecting. By not addressing that, in my mind, the ending dances around the idea of recovering from trauma without quite committing to it. And frankly, after putting up with this character for so long, we deserved a little more emotional payoff.