When we opened the first pages of Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw back in 2021, we fell in love with Jade Daniels, Graham’s perfect vision of teenage imperfection. She was scrappy and self-deprecating yet willfully too smart for her own good; her encyclopedic brain for horror trivia featured an artist’s instinct to hyper-relate the genre to the world at large. But growing up in a small doomtown like Proofrock, Idaho, is not a large world. Rather, it’s a suffocating microcosm of our crumbling society where the walls are closing in, largely to the fault of her own imagination and the occult boundaries her mind crosses to materialize various personifications of said doom.
(Photo by Gary Isaacs)
Then through 2022’s Don’t Fear the Reaper, we grew up with Jade, only to realize the more things change, the more they stay the same, even while the body count of Proofrock’s finite population rose with the tide of that cursed lake. All the while there’s a serial killer named Dark Mill South who seemed only a red herring, where even after his capture, he kept escaping; all the while paling in comparison to something untouchable under the surface of everything.
And when we commit to surviving something like Graham’s brilliant trilogy, even in the beginning, you’re already dreading the ending. And because of the inherent gravity of heartbreak, we knew there would have to be a finale for the finest final girl, Jade Daniels. In The Angel of Indian Lake, the third and last installment of the Indian Lake Trilogy, Graham successfully ties up every loose end, like serpents slithering down our neck, shedding from multiple real time eternities from the condensed Savage History of Proofrock.
And now it’s all history, just like that?
I had to ask the man.Continue Reading
