Bumpy Oak Books

**I was provided with an electronic ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**

3 stars

Stephen Graham Jones returns with his newest homage to slasher films in My Heart Is a Chainsaw. Jade is the horror chick in her senior year in her small town. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of slashers through the years. Which makes Jade the resident expert who can identify when the slasher cycle begins in her town.

This novel is every bit an ode to horror, an ode to the slasher, and also manages to push beyond that and make it deeper. I am able to recognize all that it accomplished in those areas, and still recognize that I was left feeling lukewarm. The opening scene was pretty good. Then stagnant.

I wanted to DNF at many points, but that feeling came through strong at 40%. This was the slowest of slow burns, and I even looked up other reviews which encouraged me to hang in there until 60%. Well, things picked up at 67% and from there the slasher I had hoped for set in. From there to the end, the action was pretty non-stop and had constant twists and turns and the bloodbath commenced. However, I have to acknowledge not really having a great time for basically two-thirds of the book. Perhaps if I was more of a horror buff (beyond being able to recognize the references and actually entering the point of being excited by their presence), I might not have found the pace to be so slow. The ending did bump this up from a 2.5 to a 3 without any qualms from me. The ending was absolutely solid.

While this wasn’t my favorite of Stephen Graham Jones’ works (which is The Only Good Indians), I have no hesitation in picking up more of his work in the future.