In 2021, author Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians) released My Heart Is a Chainsaw, giving horror fans a memorable heroine in high school misfit Jade Daniels. Don’t Fear the Reaper, its sequel and the second entry in Jones’ Indian Lake Trilogy, is out today—and i09 got a chance to talk to him about it.
In the Bram Stoker Award-winning Chainsaw, Jade’s obsession with slasher movies begins to bleed into real life when she becomes convinced a maniac is stalking her small Idaho town, a place with a rich and troubled history where she’s one of few Indigenous residents remaining. In Reaper, we find Jade returning home a few years after the events of Chainsaw, right when a dangerous new threat appears in the form of an escaped serial killer. Both books are infused with Jones’ own love of (and deep knowledge of) horror films, as well as themes that reflect his Native American background. What follows is a slightly edited and condensed version of our interview with Jones.
Cheryl Eddy, io9: Jade has been through a lot since the end of My Heart Is a Chainsaw. What do you think was the most important lesson she took away from the events of that book? And how has it shaped her going into Don’t Fear the Reaper?
Stephen Graham Jones: At the end of Chainsaw, and this may be a spoiler for people who haven’t read it, she does kind of save the day—but she doesn’t get credit for it. From that, she might have learned that it’s not about whether the world acknowledges you, it’s about whether you do what you think is right. Jade pretends to be all anti-society and metal and everything against the world, but I think secretly she wants to make it a better place. She wants to help people and just make things better. I think she might be slowly realizing that you don’t do it for the credit. You do it for the good it does.
io9: Why do you think she has such a hard time seeing herself as a Final Girl?
Jones: I think because over the decades—and she talks about this a little bit—the Final Girl has become this warrior princess angel up on a pedestal that people in the audience are supposed to identify with. But this Final Girl is so shining and perfect and amazing that we think we can’t match up, that we can never be like her. We can never be as tough as Ripley [in Alien] or as pure as Nancy [in A Nightmare on Elm Street]. The Final Girl within the slasher is supposed to empower us and teach us to push back against bullies. But when the Final Girl becomes so perfect that we can’t inhabit that space, then we have no position from which to push back against bullies, if that makes sense. And so Jade—still, even though I think she knows better, she’s been conditioned to subscribe to this notion of the warrior princess, perfect angel of a Final Girl. And she knows that not only is she not that, but pretty much nobody is—except, to her, [fellow My Heart Is a Chainsaw and Don’t Fear the Reaper character] Letha.
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io9: My Heart Is a Chainsaw is told almost entirely from Jade’s point of view, but Don’t Fear the Reaper really expands the perspective and gives us other characters’ point of view. Why did you decide to widen the scope for the sequel?
Jones: You’re right—in the first one, the periscope camera eye was over Jade. If it wasn’t over Jade’s shoulder, then we were reading Jade’s papers. It was Jade wall to wall. And I love Jade, and I think she’s amazing, but I know that she can be a little domineering, too; she can force her slasher reviews and her slasher lectures on people.
So the first reason I wanted to jump heads, go from person to person, in Don’t Fear the Reaper was I was afraid that too much Jade might not be a good thing. Also, I didn’t want to hurt her because I think if you shine that hot spotlight on somebody for two books in a row, unrelentingly, that’s going to burn that character a little bit. So I wanted to give Jade some off-page time too. But also, when you’re doing something that’s either narrated by someone or that’s only focused on them, as My Heart Is a Chainsaw was, then you have to stage things such that the character either always has an angle on them, or is at the center of all the key events in the book—which can get kind of contrived, and it’s really hard to make it work. It’s worthwhile, but it’s difficult.
And I’m not saying it’s necessarily easier to do it jumping heads [between] third-person [points of view], but jumping heads third-person lets the story be happening all at once, all around Indian Lake, and I can jump here and there. Also, what I found most productive was I could have two characters having almost contradictory views on the same things. I think that makes that thing more real, actually, instead of chipping away at it.
io9: When you were writing My Heart Is a Chainsaw, did you plan for it to be kicking off a trilogy?
Jones: No, it didn’t become a trilogy until the very, very final stages. What happened was [my editor] Joe Monti and I were working on it, on the notes, edits, all that. And towards the very end of it, he said, “You know, this thing you’re doing at the end, where every single person is dead in the water, that’s going to be kind of a bummer for readers.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a horror novel. It’s not supposed to be happy.” And he said, “But they’re going to want some payback on their investment of time and emotion. Why don’t you let just a few characters live?” And of course, being a stubborn writer, I thought, “Well, no way is that right.” But at the same time, I really respect him as an editor, as a thinker, as someone who knows stories. So I thought I owed it to him to give it a try. I opened a side document and I ran through it in a way in which a few people lived at the end of My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and it worked so much better than the way I had it done. And once I realized that there were people stumbling out of this massacre into the future, that future could look like a book two and a book three. So I told Joe and my agent, BJ Robbins, “It’s a trilogy.” And I pretended like I had it planned all along, but I hadn’t had it planned all along.
io9: Don’t Fear the Reaper introduces an outside antagonist in serial killer Dark Mill South. He has certain folklore and mythical elements, but he’s very much a real person. Why did you want to include this sort of true crime element in the story?
Jones: Yeah, that true crime element. I wonder if that’s just part of the world now—during the pandemic, the last three years, true crime has just exploded in every facet of our media. I haven’t watched a lot of it, I think; I guess I read a few of the books. Nevertheless, I think it’s percolated up into me, and I think that this is probably that percolation expressing itself. But at the same time, I’ve read and watched so much serial killer stuff. The trick with serial killers is to get them on the page in a way that doesn’t celebrate the bad acts they’re doing. You still want to be thrilling and we want to—I don’t know if we ever want to completely understand the serial killer, because I don’t know if we really can. Those of us who aren’t serial killers, it’s hard to understand that need to do these ritual murders every six months and all that, to enact these power dramas. But I think the world is just fascinated with true crime. And within true crime, serial killers are 90% of that fascination. I wrote Don’t Fear the Reaper after two or three years of the pandemic, and so I think I was just unintentionally part of the world that was happening at the time, if that makes sense.
io9: We haven’t traditionally seen a lot of Indigenous representation in horror, aside from, like, “Indian burial grounds” in Poltergeist and stuff like that. Thankfully, that’s changing. But when you were growing up as a horror fan, what did you make of those themes and is that something that motivated you when you started telling your own stories?
Jones: You know, what it did was, you’d always have these people stumbling into the haunted Indian burial grounds and then dying one by one over the course of the story. I would always be celebrating, like, “Yeah, dudes, y’all shouldn’t go there. Y’all shouldn’t mess with our junk.” And I guess the way it influenced me was, in My Heart Is a Chainsaw and this whole trilogy, instead of doing an Indian burial ground, I’m doing a Christian burial ground. That’s the haunted place, because [local boogeymen] Ezekiel and his unholy choir are down at the bottom of Indian Lake in Drown Town. And that’s my corruption in this case.
io9: Don’t Fear the Reaper adds an extra layer of chaos to Indian Lake’s preexisting chaos by taking place during a full-on blizzard. Why did you decide to make the weather such a factor in this one?
Jones: In slashers, you generally need to isolate the crew so that people can get picked off one by one. To tell you the truth, all these storms or whatever it is that isolates these characters in slashers, it’s really the drawing room doors in a Agatha Christie novel getting closed, you know, for a closed-door mystery. In later times, we shape those doors differently; you get stuff like Glass Onion, which literally puts [the characters] on an island. It’s just all about isolation, and you got to rig up something that makes sense for the world. And for 8,000 feet up the mountain, Idah Source: Gizmodo