My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Jade Daniels is seventeen, half Indigenous, and the town outcast in Proofrock, Idaho. She has lived through an abusive father and her own despair by learning every slasher film ever made, and she treats that knowledge as a kind of armor.

Then two tourists are murdered at Indian Lake, and a wealthy new development goes up on the opposite shore. Jade sees a pattern she knows by heart: a slasher cycle is starting, with a masked killer and a revenge waiting to be carried out.

Every such story needs a final girl, and Jade believes she has spotted one in Letha Mondragon.

The book is horror, and it works as both a slasher story and a study of the genre's rules, drawing on the films Jade loves. Beneath the scares sit trauma, class and gentrification, and the fate of a girl whom nobody in town will listen to.

It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel and is the first book in the Indian Lake Trilogy.