Chainsaw’s heart started to beat again, like Jason’s always does.
I started a new file, wrote it from the ground up again, and, even though I still wasn’t a good enough writer—are you ever?—I had learned that, with good enough first readers, I could fake it. So, thank you from the bottom of my slasher heart to Matthew Pridham, Krista Davis, Michael Somes, Cara Albert, Paul Tremblay, Kelly Lonesome, Adam Cesare, Matt Serafini, Jesse Lawrence—I think Jesse’s read most of these recent versions, even. But so has Mackenzie Kiera, so has my agent, BJ Robbins. Both of them pushed me and pushed me to make it better, when I kept thinking it was done, it was ready. I should know by now that I’m gonna be wrong, though.
Luckily, I have people to remind me of that. And thanks too to Billy J. Stratton, for always being up for some in-depth Jason Voorhees discussion, thanks to Theo for letting me smuggle his name into this book （this is me asking for permission, Ted）， thanks to Joe Ferrer for always hitting me with slashers when I need slashers, thanks to Rob Weiner for always having another title, another horror movie that, if not for him remembering it, might have been consigned to the heap. Thanks to Sandy Smith for helping me with a thorny possessive apostrophe and a lot else besides, thanks to Jessica Guess for believing in slashers—it means everything—thanks to Jason Heller for helping me with a certain t-shirt in here, thanks to Walter Chaw for always talking about horror in a meaningful, heartfelt, nothing’s-out-of-bounds way, thanks to Dan McKeithan for some nursing home details that used to be a big part of Chainsaw, thanks to Vince Liaguno for a last-moment catch, and thanks to my sister Katie, for help with a plant thing late in the game.
Anyway, I guess I’m in here pretending like a lightbulb just went off randomly in my head, and standing in that glowing cone was Jade. Wrong. What happened was I’d written that first, broken version of a slasher set around Indian Lake, but swirling it all around this kid in the iron mask wasn’t working.
I thought the story was hopeless, was all shine, no substance.
But then—and I can’t find this article, don’t want to search for it either—I stumbled onto a read about a young Native girl in Arizona who had killed herself after being molested by her （Native） father. I distinctly remember reading that article over and over, trying to make it make sense. It wouldn’t, though.
But whoever had written it had done their research, pulled in the statistics, and… this girl was alone, yes, but she also wasn’t. The numbers for this happening among Indian communities was higher than it was anywhere else.
I won’t lie that I crumpled that article up, dropped it in the trash, and opened up a new file to do this novel right. But I did now have someone to write against: that father who was never a dad. And all I had to do then was let Jade stand up from the shallows by the pier, look around for who was first on her list, here. The only real guide I had for that was Mona Simpson’s story “Lawns,” which David Kirby selected as the one story his grad class would read over and over for a semester. So, thank you, David Kirby and Mona Simpson. And also, for damming up Indian Lake, Tony Earley—the dam in his “The Prophet from Jupiter” story is the first and only literary dam, for me, and, if I’m being honest, I think that story’s where I found Hardy. Well, there and The Howling. There’s also a poem in that old anthology Vital Signs that’s important to Indian Lake—well, to Jade being Jade—but it’ll be more important later, so maybe I’ll remember to say something about it then. And thanks as well to an English teacher I had my senior year at Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas, a teacher whose name I don’t remember, since I only went to one day of my senior year. But that one day I went, you had a broken leg from a motorcycle accident, and you also had a… I don’t know, a kind of glitter or humor to your eyes that reminded me of Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati, and I knew that if I stayed in your class, you would recognize me, the real me, you’d see past the ripped jeans, the rattlesnake earring, the skunk stripe in my hair. And so I quit, I left, I ran away. But I went back and let Jade stay, and that means a lot to me. It means everything, sir. You were there for her, I mean, when no one else was. Thank you for that.
And, of course, thank you forevermuch to Carol J. Clover, for mapping out the final girl for all of us. And thank you to Kevin Williamson for giving her the perfect story to run through. And thanks to Ryan Van Cleave, for knocking on my apartment door over winter break in January 1997 in Tallahassee, Florida, and making me go see this movie he said I had to see. I didn’t want to go, I wanted to write instead, but you insisted, man, so I did. That movie was Scream. I was there on my own the next six nights in a row, soaking it in. I could feel the folds in my brain shifting, writhing, grinning.