At the end of the dam, the air swirls clear enough for her to make out this trash bear standing, carving the air with his massive claws, his roar filling every iota of space, and then— then what Jade’s always known to be a lie, what she would never believe, what all the nature shows have been lying to her about, what starts her heart like the chainsaw it is: the Momma bear tucks her cub up under herself, steps forward over it, and roars even louder than this trash bear, her lips quavering from it, her rage-saliva misting out before her, and Jade doesn’t speak bear, but she gets this all the same.
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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First I’d like to thank a certain video rental clerk from Wimberley, Texas, in about 1985, 1986. Without you slipping a crew of eighth graders five or six Freddy and Michael and Jason movies every Friday after school, so long as we had them back first thing Saturday morning, then… I can’t even imagine a life so bleak, so unslashery. Next I’d like to thank one of those eighth graders’ dads, who would always wait until we were two or three tapes in to come drag his Freddy fingers on the metal door of the garage we were in. We’d fall off the saggy couch we were piled onto, we’d blast out the side door, and we’d run like I’ve never run since, tears slipping back from my eyes, my mouth actually hurting because my smile was so wide, nothing but darkness yawning open in front of me.
I ran into that darkness, and am still running.
Next I want to thank you, reader, for running with me.
If we go fast enough, if we close our eyes tight enough, if we ball our fists tight enough and lean forward far enough, then we can still remember what it’s like to not just be terrified, but to be so terrified that we start grinning, and finally laughing, and then whether we get away or not doesn’t matter anymore, because whatever’s after us can never touch our smile.
Next I want to thank some writers who are involved with My Heart Is a Chainsaw, though they don’t know it. The first is, once again, Stephen King. His story “The Raft” is shot all through Chainsaw. I may hold the record for having read that story the most times. And Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monster s—holy something, Batman: How could I have even pretended to write Chainsaw without her book to guide me?
And, talking comic books, I maybe smuggled a certain scene from the original Secret Wars （#4） into this novel. Mostly because that issue, more than any other book ever, changed my life. And William Vollman’s 13 Stories, 13 Epitaphs is part of this as well, in kind of the same way J. R. Angelella’s novel Zombie is, the same way S. Elliot Brandis’s Young Slasher is, the same way Zachary Auburn’s A Field Guide to the Aliens of Star Trek: The Next Generation is, which is to say: me, stealing stuff. And Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides is here as well. I was so enchanted with its first-person plural delivery that all I wanted to do was hotwire it into the slasher.
So, in 2013, over about three weeks, I did. I was fresh off my second slasher, The Last Final Girl, so I figured this would be easy. Wrong. Chainsaw back then was “Lake Access Only.”
And, while Indian Lake and Proofrock were there, Jade wasn’t.
I should probably say up front here too that “Jade” is the name of someone not around anymore, someone who meant a lot to someone who means a lot to me, and Letha was a girl I knew in high school, when I was seventeen and living with a different horror crew in a trailer house in a junkyard in Midland, Texas, when we were all trying to be either George Lynch or Jon Bon Jovi. Letha’s cool last name… it seems everybody back then had better names than me. I was a Jones moving among Stoneciphers and Outlaws, Ledbetters and Mondragons. But I was Jade, too, having to stand up bigger than I was in all the high schools I kept ending up in, all over Texas and Colorado. Jade wasn’t narrating this 2013 version of My Heart Is a Chainsaw yet, though. That duty fell to a boy in an iron mask, a boy I’m pretty sure was me ripping off the narrator of The Tin Drum and dressing him up like Quiet Riot’s Metal Health album art. As you do. The whole story back then hinged on what the backside of certain turtle shells looked like, which is another way of saying that the novel Was Not Working. So I shelved it for when I could maybe be a better writer. Four years later, fresh off Mongrels, I thought I was that better writer. Wrong again, dude. I redid “Lake Access Only” from the ground up, no more first-person plural, no more turtles, and managed to find Jade and Letha in there, Hardy and Camp Blood, but the novel still wasn’t working. So I wrote some different ones instead. One of them was The Only Good Indians—another slasher.