Final Girls
For all the lip service that’s paid to the final girl, she rarely gets her due on screen. It’s no one’s fault, really — if you’re going to squeeze a respectable body count into a 90-minute slasher movie, there’s hardly time for a deep dive into the heroine’s background and motivation (beyond a keen desire to avoid getting stabbed to death).
So the recent spate of final girl novels, from Riley Sager’s Final Girls to Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group, isn’t just a welcome addition to the slasher canon — it’s a necessary one. Novelists such as Sager and Hendrix are exploring one of horror’s most appealing archetypes in ways filmmakers can’t.
Case in point: Stephen Graham Jones’ ferocious 28th-ish novel, My Heart Is a Chainsaw (Gallery / Saga Press). Jones’s follow-up to his Shirley Jackson Award-winning breakout book The Only Good Indians (and his Shirley Jackson Award-winning novella Night of the Mannequins — Jones had a good night at this year’s virtual awards ceremony) centers on 17-year-old Jade Daniels, a half-Blackfeet girl in rural Idaho who finds solace in slasher films.
The Big Thrill.
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Photo courtesy of the author
About Stephen Graham Jones:
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of nearly thirty novels and collections, and there are some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, three Bram Stoker Awards, two Shirley Jackson Awards, four This is Horror Awards, and he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award. He’s also made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels, and is the guy who wrote Mongrels and The Only Good Indians. Next up is My Heart is a Chainsaw. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado.
