My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

 

I am the weird horror fan who doesn't like slasher movies; Stephen Graham Jones fucking adores them, and this novel is book one of a three-part paean to slasher movies. It's written just fine, the characters are believable and the prose works pretty well--he even handles nicely a stark register change between the mainline narration and the main character's journals (or whatever). The story's pacing kinda drags, though, and that's not helped by the fact Jones is basically the whole time mining slasher movies for the tropes he's going to deploy (and his POV is as huge a fan as he is, so she knows them) but slasher movies--including the various precursors Jones references--are movies (kinda stupid movies, but movies) and movies have different strengths and weaknesses and needs than novels, and I'm not convinced that novels are the right medium to try to tell slasher stories. Basically this book felt kinda like something of a category error to me. I'll see how book two goes, I might not bother with book three.