All the homework I’d been doing my whole life, it was suddenly worth it.
And—Wes Craven. I don’t take many selfies, at least not on purpose, but one I did take, and still have, is of me in a Ghostface mask in 2015 in Salt Lake City, Utah, the day Wes Craven died. There’s a reason My Heart Is a Chainsaw is set when it is, I mean.
Thank you, Mr. Craven.
You changed my world in 1984, and you changed it again in 1996. I wouldn’t be the same without you.
And, Chainsaw, it wouldn’t be the same without my champion of an editor, Joe Monti. Him and the whole Saga and Simon & Schuster team: Lisa Litwack, for the amazing cover, and all the hard work to get to that cover; Sherry Wasserman and Dave Cole, for saving my life in copyediting; Jaime Putorti, for designing this amazing interior; Kaitlyn Snowden, production manager, for keeping all the wheels turning; Madison Penico, for keeping versions straight, for keeping the manuscript sensible, for keeping all my paperwork in order, which I could never do alone; Caroline Pallotta, Allison Green, and Iris Chen, in managing editorial; and Jennifer Bergstrom, publisher, Jennifer Long, associate publisher, and Sally Marvin, VP of publicity and marketing— there couldn’t be a better team. And thanks to Lauren Jackson, the most amazing marketing and publicity magician, statistician, and make-it-happen-inator I’ve ever worked with.
But, Joe Monti: it would have been so easy for him to make me resculpt this novel such that Jade being Blackfeet would be instrumental instead of incidental. But Joe never even considered that, I don’t think. Instead he did what good editors do: he crawled inside the story, looked around at what it was trying to do, and offered up a list of ways it could do that better. He got Chainsaw in order, I mean, the same as he’d done with The Only Good Indians, once upon a fairy tale. And the story, it just… it started locking in place. It was all I could do to write fast enough to keep up. You remember in Cat’s Cradle, how all the water turns to ice-nine? That’s what happened with My Heart Is a Chainsaw, after I touched Joe’s notes to the manuscript.
Thanks, Joe Monti. You saved me again.
Here’s to many more saves.
I just searched my inbox, too. My search was “Lake Access Only,” Chainsaw’s old title. The first time it shows up is July 15, 2010. It’s second in a stack of four titles I thought it might be fun to write into slashers some fine day.
This is that day.
Again, thank you, reader, for coming all the way out to Indian Lake with me, where the air’s thin and the water red, and thank you to my two kids, Rane and Kinsey, for always watching slashers with me and talking slashers and dressing up as slashers. It’s meant the world, y’all. I treasure it like nothing else. No dad’s ever been so lucky as I am, getting to watch you grow up. And, thank you to my wife, Nancy. Back when I was writing Demon Theory in 1999—my first slasher—the video rental places in Lubbock, Texas, would always do 99-cent horror movies, and I’d come back with a stack of Jason and Michael and Freddy tapes night after night, but I would always be too scared to watch them on my own. This was the first house we lived in, remember? Your grandparents’ old house. I have such a distinct memory of standing in their doorway and meeting them in 1991 and looking past them to the console television with Lawrence Welk playing. Eight years later, it was you and me there, Nan, and the television was in the same place, only, instead of Lawrence Welk, it was chainsaws and machetes, masks and screaming, and me in a chair soaking it all in until the small hours, and you, who had to get up at five in the morning to work the payment window at the power company, sleeping on the old couch in the glow of that television, sleeping there because you knew I wouldn’t be safe with all this scary stuff alone.
Thank you, Nancy, for keeping me safe all those nights. I think the only time I haven’t been wrong was when I said to you that maybe we could make a life together, and grow old holding each other’s hand.
My heart is a chainsaw, yes, but you’re the one who starts it.
Stephen Graham Jones
Boulder, Colorado, USA
November 27, 2020