My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(130)

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