2021
My Heart Is a Chainsaw
MH
Four Blackfeet men, one broken hunt a decade ago, and something with antlers that remembers — literary horror that hits like a slasher and lingers like a wound.
Ten years ago, four young Blackfeet men — Ricky, Lewis, Gabe, and Cass — went hunting on a stretch of land reserved for tribal elders and did something they've spent a decade trying to forget. The book opens with Ricky dying outside a North Dakota bar in what the papers will call an accident. It wasn't.
Lewis has built a life off the reservation: a steady job, a wife, a dog. But he's started seeing something in his living room — a figure with a woman's body and an elk's head — and the harder he tries to reason it away, the tighter the past closes around him. What follows is a slow, sickening unraveling as an old debt comes due for each of the four men in turn.
Jones writes horror that is inseparable from its setting: reservation life, basketball, sweat lodges, the pull and cost of leaving home. The entity stalking these men is terrifying, but the book's real subject is guilt — cultural, personal, generational — and it builds to a final confrontation, staked on a young girl and a basketball game, that readers argue about to this day.
Yes — it swept the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Ray Bradbury awards for a reason, and it's the best entry point into Stephen Graham Jones.
Honest caveats: Jones's prose is elliptical and slippery, with perspective shifts and a dreamlike blurring of what's real that some readers find confusing, especially in the first hundred pages. The violence — including the fate of a dog and some brutal set pieces — is genuinely hard to read. And the extended basketball sequence near the end strikes some as a tonal gamble. But the dread is masterful, the cultural specificity is the opposite of window dressing, and the ending chooses something braver than revenge. Readers who push through the disorienting start rarely regret it.
No — there's no film or series version of The Only Good Indians to watch, so the book is the only way to experience this story. Given how much of its power lives in Jones's interior, voice-driven prose, that may be for the best. If you're curious how his work translates to other registers, his slasher trilogy starting with My Heart Is a Chainsaw is even more movie-obsessed on the page. For now: read first, because there's nothing to spoil it.
Yes. It builds slowly, but when the violence arrives it's graphic and unsparing — one sequence involving a dog and a later stretch of slasher-style carnage are frequently cited as hard to read. Jones uses the brutality purposefully, but sensitive readers should know it's there.
The opening third disorients a lot of readers by design — Jones shifts perspective, blurs hallucination and reality, and even slides into the entity's point of view. It clicks once you stop fighting it and let the ambiguity work. If you stall early, keep going; the second half is far more propulsive.
No. Jones, who is Blackfeet, writes the cultural context into the story naturally — the elders' hunting grounds, reservation life, basketball's importance, the pressure of stereotypes the title ironizes. The specificity is what makes the horror land, not a barrier to entry.
Go straight to My Heart Is a Chainsaw, the first book of Jones's Indian Lake trilogy, which won the Bram Stoker Award and doubles down on his love of slasher films. His earlier novella Mapping the Interior is a shorter, haunting companion piece about fathers and ghosts.
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