#proofrock

[luthorcorp1313]

I finished The Angel of Indian Lake recently and there were so many feelings. I was originally just going to say a couple of things and it got away from me so I just did it this way. If you want to read my rambling, cool, if not, long story short: Stephen Graham Jones is fucking awesome, Jade Daniels is 100% my Final Girl of all final girls, and the Indian Lake Trilogy is such a good read on so many levels so everyone should read it.

There is an amazing amount of depth and heart to it that you just don't usually see in horror fiction and on top of that, the trilogy starts out as a total love letter to 80s slashers and final girls, with the real surprise being the protagonist, half-Blackfeet and full outcast Jade Daniels, the rebel girl who is always in trouble for something and has memorized everything about every slasher film (up to that point) while praying for a real slasher to hit her town of Proofrock, Idaho, but be careful what you wish for, right? Love her!! Lots of subplot about the colonization and takeover of Native lands, as SGJ is a Native American writer and that figures into his work. So much depth. Anyway, did I say this was the short version??? Just read the books! 😂🔪🖤🫀🩸

[aidenwaites]

OH now that ive finished listening to iwats I can listen to the My Heart is a Chainsaw audiobook,,

[marypsue]

Also I haven't actually read Don't Fear The Reaper yet, so if that's the exact direction the Indian Lake Trilogy is actually going in canon I will a) stare at the ceiling for a bit and b) be intensely grateful that an author I trust as much as Stephen Graham Jones is writing it so I don't have to.

[ninja-muse]

At last, a month where I feel like I read enough! The trick, clearly, was to pick up graphic novels and other very short things. Will this trend continue in November? Almost certainly not.

Followers might have seen my review for The Dollmakers by Lynn Buchanan last week but that's not actually my top read of the month. That honour goes to Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, which I got as an ARC from work, told myself I wouldn't read just yet, then promptly picked up after The Dollmakers and all but burned through. It's about the female authors we know Austen read and why they were bestsellers in their day but are barely known now, with all sorts of publishing and book industry history thrown in, along with a dose of memoir. Needless to say, I was the target audience and I've added a good handful of classics to my TBR. (It's out in February, in case you're interested.)

The rest of my top reads are there for just being solidly good. The Disappearing Spoon gave me all the fun science history I wanted. The Angel of Indian Lake gave me a good horror trilogy ending. The Tropic of Serpents gave me more Lady Trent adventures. And so on. I only really had two misses: The Aeronaut's Windlass, which felt very by-the-books epic fantasy without pushing boundaries, and Wordhunter, which I'm actively recommending people don't read. It was utterly average and kind of trying too hard to be edgy, and then it needlessly introduced sexual violence against women and children and handled both badly. How a book that lets a pedophile off with a warning got published in 2024, I will never understand.

In happier news, my book haul! Two books this month: Sorcery and Small Magics, sent by the publisher, and another volume of The Unwritten, meaning I only need to find one and I've got the full run. Hurray! (If you ever spot Vol. 9, folks, lemme know.)

All that reading means that I haven't done much writing. I need to get back to that, but at least I know what was blocking me and am working to rectify the situation. I am, however, starting to get seriously envious of authors who were able to write during the pandemic and are now getting those novels published. I stopped writing entirely for a year and a half, for various reasons, and now I feel like I've fallen behind.

Someday I might return to the Not-Quite-Urban Fantasy but I'm still too raw to handle the edits even now.

Oh, the worlds of might-have-been!

And now I've gone and left this on a down note. There'll be more positivity next month, I promise. In the meantime, here’s my list of everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf - Rebecca Romney

A rare book dealer explores the literary histories of Austen’s favourite female authors, and how they didn’t make the English canon the way Austen did. Out in February.

8/10

reading copy

The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean

An entertaining history of chemistry, atomic physics, and the elements of the periodic table.

8/10

library ebook

The Tropic of Serpents - Marie Brennan

Isabella Camherst travels south to Bayembe to study savannah dragons, but finds herself caught in politics and sent on a mission to the swamp of Mouleen.

7.5/10

African-coded secondary characters, 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (asexual)

library book

The Dollmakers - Lynn Buchanan

When Shean of Pearl receives, and refuses, an artisan dollmaker license, she sets off for a remote village to prove she and her dolls have what it takes to be guards against the Shod. If this means luring the monsters in, so be it.

7.5/10

reading copy

The Angel of Indian Lake - Stephen Graham Jones

Jade Daniels, now Proofrock’s history teacher, has put slasher cycles behind her. Except it’s looking like another one’s started anyway.

7.5/10

Blackfoot protagonist, 🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (sapphic), Black secondary characters

warning: blood, gore, death, murder

reading copy

Reluctant Immortals - Gwendolyn Kiste

Lucy Westrena and Bee Rochester are trying to get through the days in 1967 LA when their exes return in San Fransisco.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters (sapphic), Jamaican-British secondary character

warning: abusive relationships

reading copy

Bury Your Gays - Chuck Tingle

After Misha refuses to kill off his queer leads for the season finale, he finds himself stalked by horror villains he created.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (gay), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters (bi, aroace), 🏳️‍🌈 author

warning: death, murder, torture, homophobia, child abuse

library book

Ms. Marvel, Vol. 7 - G. Willow Wilson with Mirka Andolfo (Illustrator), Takeshi Miyazawa (Illustrator)

Kamala Khan faces two difficult foes: gerrymandering and a sentient computer virus.

6.5/10

Pakistani-American protagonist, Muslim protagonist, Pakistani-American secondary characters, Muslim secondary characters, 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (sapphic), Black secondary character, secondary character with limb damage and a cane, Muslim author

warning: outing

off my TBR

Paladin’s Grace - T. Kingfisher

Stephen is a paladin whose god has died. Grace is a perfumer trying to keep her past buried. Witnesses to a failed assassination, they now must work together to navigate a world of intrigue, poisoners, and zealots. It’s a good thing they like each other.

6.5/10

off my TBR/ebook

Plain Jane and the Mermaid - Vera Brosgol

When Jane’s potential fiancé is kidnapped by a mermaid, she descends into the depths to rescue him even though she can never hope to compete with true waifish beauty.

7.5/10

warning: body shaming

library book

Sorcery and Small Magics - Maiga Doocy

Leovander Loveage and Sebastian Grimm get along like oil and water—which makes it all the worse when Leo's hit with an illegal curse and they must work together to break it.

6.8/10

🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (achillean), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (achillean), 🏳️‍🌈 minor character (ungendered), minor character with dark skin, minor character who uses a cane

gifted by publisher

Dictionary of Fine Distinctions - Eli Bernstein

Illuminating and illustrated definitions of commonly confused words.

7/10

library book

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa

When Takako finds herself adrift in life, she accepts a room in her estranged uncle’s bookshop.

7/10

Japanese cast, Japanese author

library book

Wordhunter - Stella Sands

A spiky forensic linguistics student is tapped by her local PD to help find a kidnapped teen, but that brings up a missing person’s case from her own past. Too close, too soon.

2/10

Black secondary character

warning: drug use, alcohol abuse, rape and an odd attitude towards its aftermath, pedophiles given a pass

library book

Picture books

All the Books - Hayley Rocco

Piper loves books so much she takes her whole collection everywhere, but when her wagons tip over in the rain she discovers … the library!

9/10

DNF

The Aeronaut’s Windlass - Jim Butcher

The cold war between Spires Albion and Aurora is heating up, and something uncanny is showing itself. Caught in it all are Captain Grimm, late of the Predator, a handful of trainee guards, and a prince of cats.

library ebook

Currently reading

The Price of the Stars - Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald

When Beka’s politician mother is assassinated, her father gives her his warship in exchange for her tracking the assassins down. But when someone has it in for your family, sometimes one must take drastic measures.

off my TBR

The Empress Letters - Linda Rogers

A mother in the 1920s writes her life story in a series of letters to the daughter she’s searching for in China.

🇨🇦, Chinese secondary characters

warning: fetal remains, anti-Chinese racism

off my TBR

Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century - Richard Taruskin A history of early written European music, in its social and political contexts.

The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle Victorian detective stories

disabled POV character (limb injury), occasional Indian secondary characters

warning: racism, colonialism

Monthly total: 14 + 1 Yearly total: 106 Queer books: 3 Authors of colour: 2 Books by women: 9 Authors outside the binary: 0 Canadian authors: 0 Classics: 0 Off the TBR shelves: 3 Books hauled: 2 ARCs acquired: 3 ARCs unhauled: 4 DNFs: 1

January February March April May June July August September

[haveyoureadthispoll]

Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold. Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges… a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body.

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

for 2024's pointless end of year exercise, i will be rating the first lines of all 34 books i read this year (or rather, 32 books i read this year and 2 i'm in the process of reading) in order of how much i liked them. the list contains both fiction and non-fiction but doesn't count anything i read for my master's thesis. short story and essay collections only get one entry, which is the first line of the first story/essay in the collection. rankings are based purely on how much i liked the first line and the first line only, NOT how much i liked the whole book.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves. This is not for you.

Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews. Sometimes your body is someone else's haunted house.

Gabriel García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. 

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. "Now we will live!"

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Let me begin again.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History. The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.

Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer. I will be her witness.

George R. R. Martin, Nightflyers (in Nightflyers and Other Stories). When Jesus of Nazareth hung dying on the cross, the Volcryn passed within a year of his agony, headed outward.

Stephen King, The Gunslinger. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays. What makes Iago evil?

Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth. In the myriadic year of our lord— the ten thousandth year of the King of the Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!— Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu (in The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories). Above all remember this: that magic belongs as much to the heart as to the head and everything which is done, should be done from love or joy or righteous anger.

Joan Didion, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream (in Slouching Towards Bethlehem). This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country.

Joan Didion, Run River. Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one.

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

Neil Gaiman, Stardust. There was once a young man who wished to gain his heart's desire.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun. When we were new, Rosa and I were mid-store, on the magazine table side, and could see through more than half of the window.

Stephen Graham Jones, My Heart is a Chainsaw. On the battered paper map that's carried the two of them across they're not sure how many American states now, this is Proofrock, Idaho, and the dark body of water before them is Indian Lake, and it kind of goes forever out into the night. 

B. Catling, The Erstwhile. This is where the man-best crawls, its once-virtuous body turned inside out, made raw and skinless, growing vines and sinews backwards through the flesh, stiff primordial feathers pluming in its lungs, thorns and rust knotted to barbed wire in its loins.

Joan Didion, The White Album (in The White Album). We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves. Place ten dozen hungry orphan thieves in a dank burrow of vaults and tunnels beneath what used to be a graveyard, put them under the supervision of one partly crippled old man, and you will soon find that governing them becomes a delicate business. 

Patricia Highsmith, Ripley's Game. 'There's no such thing as a perfect murder,' Tom said to Reeves.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day. It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. 

N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky. Time grows short, my love.

Martha Wells, All Systems Red. I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my government module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. 

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way.

Louis-Henri de la Rochefoucauld, Châteux de sable. L'épisode eut lieu il y a quelques années au château de ma grand-mère.

Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Underground. Tom was in the garden when the telephone rang. 

Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire. "I see…" said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window.

Brian Deer, The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on Vaccines. On the first night of Donald Trump's presidency, a video went up on the World Wide Web that sent a shudder through medicine and science. 

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma.

Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat. I am the vampire Lestat.

Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned. I'm the Vampire Lestat.

[mylifeinfiction]

The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones

Scars proved you lived.

I admittedly have a pretty serious love/hate relationship with Jade Daniels. Her papers throughout My Heart Is a Chainsaw really tested my patience, and her immaturity throughout the events of that book seemed a bit too much. But the person she begins to grow into by the end of Chainsaw and throughout the events of the all-around masterpiece that is the middle book of this trilogy, Don't Fear the Reaper , is so interesting and complete that I couldn't help but fall in love with Jade Daniels and every blood-soaked thing for which she stands.

"...the cool thing about trilogies is you get to use every last part of the buffalo."

Stephen Graham Jones's The Angel of Indian Lake isn't quite the all-around horror masterpiece that Reaper is, but it is a wholly worthy final chapter in The Indian Lake Trilogy, or: The Savage History of Proofrock, Idaho. Throughout the trilogy, we've seen Jade Daniels go from immature, delusional slasher fantasist, to begrudgingly badass final girl, to hesitant horror historian. Best to call it the The Violent Coming-of-Age of a Reluctantly Willing Final Girl. It's an authentically compelling character arc that relishes the romance of the final girl without ever shying away from the traumatic weight of the role and the cyclical nature of violence throughout the history America.

She's right. In the rock/paper/scissors of horror, chainsaw always wins. Cops and guns don't work against slashers, trucks and fire are big fat fails, but a chainsaw? If you've got a chainsaw, you're pretty damn golden.

The Angel of Indian Lake ties the trilogy together so beautifully, so viciously, that even its flaws are fascinating. SGJ makes the risky decision to close out Jade's story by throwing us headfirst into her mind, writing Angel in an (often stream-of-conscious) first-person narrative. Jade's mind is a chaotic, damaged landscape that can often create pacing issues due to her unfocused, rambling narration, but it also gives us a deeper look into the root of these horrific events, bringing the many disjointed storylines together in a brutally bloody, emotionally exhausting and thematically cathartic manner.

And the plotting itself is even more risky, bringing together every last piece of this epic horror saga in a batshit crazy onslaught of slaughter. But thankfully, SGJ's vision is complete, and he conducts these exceedingly insane displays of slasher carnage in a way that only ever enriches the overarching themes; and more than makes up for the lulls between. The climactic massacre is so dam wild, and I loved every bizarre, messy minute of it. Jade and those she loves are seriously put through the wringer, here, but it all comes together for such a fitting, bittersweet ending that brings Jade to exactly where she needs to be.

Despite those pacing issues and some moments of feeling completely lost among all those players and plot-points, SGJ sticks the landing, delivering a third installment that does indeed "mash that pedal to the floor until it gets stuck", and thankfully never loses traction.

It's supposed to mean Proofrock's slasher days are over.

8/10

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

[semper-legens]

56. My Heart Is A Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones

Owned?: No, library Page count: 439 My summary: Jade is not a troubled teen. Sure, she loves playing macabre pranks on her classmates, doesn't have any friends, and sees life through the lens of slasher movies - but with the life she's been given, who can blame her? The only Native girl in her little rural community, living with a deadbeat dad and a world that hates her, Jade has every disadvantage in life and nowhere to go. But when the signs line up that a real-life slasher is coming to Proofrock, suddenly Jade's life has a deeper meaning. She knows what this is. She's ready. And she's going to make sure that the right story plays out. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I kept picking this book up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down, not sure if I wanted to read it. There was, in fact, one thing that ultimately clinched it for me - the author. I read The Only Good Indians a while back and fell in love with its dark outlook, its complex politics, and the deep trauma that oozes from every page. This looked to be similar in style and tone, a dark urban fantasy with a killer on the loose, and only one girl who can stop it. But she's all kinds of fucked up and nobody wants to listen to her, of course. That's the way these things go. So how did the story pan out? Deeply engaging, strange, lyrical, and bloody as one might expect from a slasher tale. I enjoyed it, though it was by no means an easy read.

(Warning for mention of suicide, sexual assault and abuse, child molestation and incest under the cut.)

Jade is the main character and the main draw of this novel. A lot is riding on her as a protagonist, and I'm glad to say that she very much carries the narrative by being a deeply interesting character. Jade starts out bruised, wounded, latching onto her slasher-movie ideas of how the world works and fitting everything into that framework. She becomes fixated on Letha, a new and rich girl at school moving into the newly-built community of Terra Nova, because she is convinced Letha will be the 'Final Girl'. It's to the point where she reads really strongly as being autistic, with a hyperfocus that overrides everything. At various points, she wonders if going to the police about her concerns is worth it - she knows Letha needs to have certain experiences to set her up as Final Girl, and the police are useless in slasher movies anyway. Everything she does, she brings back to slashers. Interspersed throughout the chapters are essays she wrote to her beloved History teacher about slashers in lieu of homework, bringing her interest into the school subject. She's flawed, of course. Mentally ill, aware of her own strangeness, wrapped up in her own head, and hopelessly avoidant. But all of those flaws just make her a stronger character, and a very engaging one to boot.

This book is, largely, about trauma - both the specific trauma experienced by the main character and a more generalised trauma specific to Indigenous people throughout the US. (The characters universally use 'Indian' to describe Jade and her father, but I'm a white English person, so I'm going to use 'Indigenous' and 'Native'.) Jade is a very troubled kid. It's teased early on that something might have happened with her father - she hates him, and partially wants her life to be a slasher movie so that he dies. Letha suspects her father molested her, which she refutes; this turns out to be the case towards the end of the book, however. Jones' afterword to the book mentions that Jade as a character didn't start to solidify to him until after he read an article about a Native girl who killed herself after being abused by her father, and how widespread an issue that was in Native communities.

Jade herself starts the book with a suicide attempt, and throughout displays a lack of care towards her own life that is at the very least passively suicidal, if not actively trying to get herself killed. She's in denial, she's fixated on slasher movies both as a coping mechanism and as a refuge. Applying their framework to her life is how she rationalises and copes with the world around her. There's an underlying tension in earlier parts of the book as to whether there actually is a slasher killer on the streets of Proofrock or if Jade is drawing conclusions where there are none, wanting to protect girls from their fathers in a show of misplaced revenge. A lot of the more obviously slasher-y things we see only happen when Jade is alone, bringing into question her narration. That, plus the hazy, stream of consciousness first person voice really brings a dark and uncertain tone to the whole book.

And, of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how race and Indigeneity plays into the entire affair. Does Jade fixate on Letha because she's Black, the only other girl of colour in school? But more than that, race underpins everything. The lake the bulk of the action centres around is called Indian Lake, and one of the first signs a slasher is in town is the mass-killing of elk nearby, a motif that also appears in The Only Good Indians. Hell, the rich people building a new settlement in town call their home Terra Nova, literally 'New World'. And the slasher? A ghost, it turns out - a little Native girl whose mother was killed, who herself died in a cruel prank, and whose spirit cannot sink beneath the waters of Indian Lake because she is a 'heathen' in the eyes of the Church. It all comes back to the poisoning of Native land and Native lives by the settlers who would claim it as their own - no accident, then, that Jade is the only one who sees the truth. Trauma both personal and intergenerational, and all circling around Jade. Poor kid. But such a compelling character, and I'm so glad I finally picked this up and read it. It's harrowing, but it's a really good read.

Next up, from one horrible thing to another, as we take a look at a boy who drew Auschwitz.

[lucifers-horror-harem]

charlotte idk if you've heard about this book before or not but you GOTTA check out "my heart is a chainsaw" its about a girl, jade, whos obsessed with slasher films, and she lives in a place called proofrock where there was a massacre 50 years ago and now someone is starting to kill again, its the start of a trilogy iirc and its so fucking good its got so many horror references 🔪🩸

Omg I'm so sorry I forgot to respond to this when I saw it. But I actually do know of this series!! I bought the first book but haven't sat down to read it yet cause I've been a tad bad at reading in general. (I don't think I've read OR listened to a book since like summer last year) So I'm going to try to do some more reading this summer and it's on my list to read!!! I've actually read one of the author's other books though, The Only Good Indians and that one was soooooooo fucking good so I'm excited to check this series out!

[brightbeautifulthings]

The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones

"I used to be all about the final girl standing on top of a pile of the dead at the end of the movie, her face dripping blood, her chest heaving, her eyes fierce. Now I'm all about holding the door of the slasher-proof shelter open, so everybody can duck in, ride this out."

Year Read: 2024

Rating: 4/5

Thoughts: I put this off for a bit because I wasn't ready for the trilogy to be over, and I'm pretty emotional about this horrific, blood-drenched, heartfelt series as a whole--which honestly tells you a lot about me and it. Fans of the first two books will find plenty to love about it, and the character development for Jade throughout the series is really good. I adore her as a main character and a final girl. She's the beating, bloody heart of these books, and I'm excited that she'll live on in slasher history for girls to look up to and see themselves in and celebrate alongside Laurie Strode and Sidney Prescott as peak examples for the genre. There's a lot of her trying to manage her own trauma in this book, which typically isn't something we get to see a lot of in horror. While I felt the narrative was tighter in Don't Fear the Reaper, this one falls back into some of the habits of My Heart Is a Chainsaw, where it sometimes feels like we get a bit lost in her internal monologue at the expense of what's happening. It feels intentional--the very real consequences of a trauma spiral--but as a spectator it's occasionally frustrating.

It's up there with the first two books as far as gore and body count, and I enjoy the fact that no matter how much I know I'm in a slasher, I'm still surprised when the violence explodes out of nowhere from the least expected directions. Jones has a talent for dreaming up horrific mass death scenes, usually not once but several times in a book. The killers are a little all over the place in this one, no looming specter of Dark Mill South to ground the book, but I think it works. It dips into some seriously dark territory at one point, but I like the way it's all pulled together by the end, the lore of previous books coming back to shape this one. While Don't Fear the Reaper is still my favorite (weird, right? way to go all Catching Fire with it), I enjoyed the series a lot overall and will be glad to return to Jade and Proofrock in future rereads. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Saga Press.

[aidenwaites]

Hettie reaching for her camera to use it as a weapon in the very last moments of her life. Her camera being the thing she wants so badly to save her. Her little documentary is going to be the thing to get her out of Proofrock. It's such a good moment to open on for the final installment of the trilogy

[magratpudifoot]

Finished 25 May 2025:

The Angel of Indian Lake - Stephen Graham Jones

I devoured the first two books in this trilogy, but I also got a little bit of that same weariness of reading about characters I care about getting beaten down that always kneecaps my attempts to revisit/catch up with The Dresden Files*. Which is a real testament to how much I care about Jade and Letha, because I'm a horror nerd--Paul Tremblay is one of my favorite authors, I am considering incorporating a Cabin in the Woods reference into a tattoo, the Angel episodes "Hellbound" and "Damage" are my coziest comfort stories. Slashers are not my subgenre of choice by a long shot, but I don't typically shy away from media just because 99% of the cast is going to get pulverized. But Jade and Letha and Adie and Stacey and Proofrock have already been through so much. Let them rest.

I didn't quite trust Jones to let them rest.

About halfway through The Angel of Indian Lake, I recommended the series to a couple of people I had been hesitant to tell about it because of some of the themes regarding sexual predation, and how brutal the gorier moments can be. But my gosh, what Jones does with Jade, how he lets her be exactly who she is, exactly the sort of beautiful human that I am lucky enough to have one or two of in my life, who takes their pain and anger and uses it to make sure no one else has to feel the way they did. Who keeps learning and growing anyway they can. It's a thing of goddamned beauty.

And then...

Because I was listening to the audiobook, I thought when I heard Jones' voice that it was the author note and the story was over. I ran the book back a couple of chapters to listen for THE THING I needed to happen to keep me from having to rescind my recommendations and throw out my copies of the books. THE THING that proved I understood what Jones was doing, that he was the writer I thought he was, at least in this series**. It wasn't until I angrily, confusedly read the Wikipedia plot summary that I realized--when Jones first starts reading on the audiobook, it's the epilogue, not the author's note.

I hadn't finished the story.

NOW THAT I HAVE... Am I a little miffed at Jones for structuring the story so THE THING happens in an epilogue? YUP. And does it kind of spoil my feelings about the series' thesis that THE THING ever became a thing that needed to happen in the first place? YUP--considering the particular types of changes that happened between My Heart Is a Chainsaw and Don't Fear the Reaper, it is hard to stomach that it was ever possible for the inciting incidents that led to THE THING needing to happen. Jones lampshades that oversight with a Scream allusion, so OKAY, I guess it's still playing within the rules of the series' narrative logic. I just think the exact same thing could have been done even if there had been a few VERY REASONABLE AND NECESSARY GUARDRAILS put in place between 1 and 2 to make it less likely. If you're not worried about spoilers and want to talk more about this, my inbox is open.

That said, my goodness, if this isn't the most perfect horror trilogy I have ever read, and one of the very few horror stories where I'd say the finale is better than the elevator pitch.

*I just couldn't when those two finally came out during the pandemic lockdown, and I still haven't been able to. Because GODS DAMMIT BUTCHER HARRY NEEDS A BREAK. NOT A BONE FRACTURE, A BREAK.

**I really liked The Only Good Indians and really did not like Night of the Mannequins, so I haven't yet got a handle on if he is a T. Kingfisher or a Grady Hendrix, whose work I will read every time even if one or two don't work for me, or a Lauren Beukes, who has one book that resonated deep, deep in my soul but whose other work isn't reliably My Thing enough for me to preorder everything she writes. Jones' comment in his author note about Uvalde making him wonder if he was still a horror writer makes me confident that, even if his earlier work is hit and miss for me, I'm in good hands going forward.

[arachnaetheyarnspider]

Books I Disliked Project

So, I'm thinking of re-reading books that I disliked back in middle/high school, to see if my opinion has changed now that I'm a 30-something adult. So far, the ones I'm thinking of revisiting: 1. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. (At the time, this had mostly struck me as a needlessly sadistic take on high school drama, with unrealistically well-organized bullies, a tendency to assume all cruel behavior is rooted in suppressed kinkiness, and an annoying misinterpretation of The Lovesong of J. Alfred Proofrock)

2. Z for Zachariah by Robert O'Brien. (The first half felt like a competent post-apocalyptic last-survivor type story, which takes a hard turn into a pointlessly cruel story about a girl being hunted down in her abandoned valley. I'm not sure if it's actually true, but at the time most of my class was under the impression that the author had died about halfway through, and that it was finished, badly, by his daughter. I'd want to fact-check that one before giving a full review).

3. The Natural by Bernard Malamud. (This one... yeah, this is just a fever dream. Pointless sex scenes, pointless plot detours, pointless betrayals... I think there was one scene where the main character ate until his stomach ruptured? And birds, especially dead birds, are symbolic? I mostly just remember vividly and intensely hating the text at the time. I've since heard the suggestion that the whole thing is a baseball-AU retelling of the story of King Arthur?)

4. Hardball, by Chris Matthews. (This one was assigned as summer reading for my AP Gov class. I just utterly despised the author's voice. I remember that the essay I wrote on it more or less boiled down to "If you want us to read something Machiavellian, just have us read Machiavelli.)

I'm sure I'll remember more books I disliked as I go through but... does anyone want to join me on this project? Or just have any suggestions for books they disliked on first reading, but would consider looking at again?

[haveyoureadthispoll]

Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones. Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho. Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday. Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.

[kinetic-elaboration]

September 13: Jade/Letha/Banner (1?)

Indian Lake Trilogy, canon-complaint through Reaper with one obvious difference. I really wanted to write a threesome, is the thing. But that's not what this is.

~780 words, 30 minutes

*

This time, when Jade's released from prison, it's Banner who picks her up outside the gates and then insists on taking her home. He means his home but says it like it's hers too, which is of course a lie. She puts up a fight about it that's more than token resistance but not much. He answers like he's tired and maybe a little bored, like he'll break soon just to get her to shut up, except that he doesn't stop answering, doesn't stop, doesn't stop, doesn't stop, until they're back in Proofrock again, and then she lapses into silence and pretends this isn't letting him win.

In his new truck that looks a lot like the old one, except the headlights aren't smashed in and the color's a bright alarm red instead of black, he takes her down Main Street, silent, watching her out of the corner of his eye. She can feel it. Maybe after tangoing with two killers—hell, more than two, but two massacres, two horror shows—she's just got an extra sense for a pair of eyes trying to drill into the side of her skull, with the same intensity of an actual bone-shattering power tool. Or maybe it's just him. Some sort of bond they’ve got or something.

"Are you a real deputy now?" she asks, to make conversation when they roll on past the dollar store.

"I'm the whole damn department," he answers. Then: "Me and Meg."

It's not snowing this time but it's not spring either: the second week of February, frigid blue-cold with a knife-like wind and that same old snow perma-frosted to the ground. When that wind picks up it blows snowflakes wafting over the crystalline, clear snow mounds, the ones that were probably sparkling in this morning's sun. Now it's early dusk and only bruises of purple shadow shade on down the sides of them.

The Tompkins house looks like it always did on the outside, must have been transformed on the inside, because the decor is all Mondragon. Like they've split the property right down the middle. He maintains the outside; she transforms the in. Most of the rooms are dark, feel like they're shrouded. Jade makes out the details of the front hallway, the living room, the kitchen as she glimpses it through a doorway. The living room's the easiest because they linger there a while and because one of the lights is actually on, sending out ever-fading circles of concentric yellow-white. A girl—Gal, must be, because she looks about the right age and somewhat familiar—is sitting at the edge of the couch, in the brightest part of the spotlight, holding Adrienne asleep in her arms.

She turns her head around halfway, half-upside down, doesn't move otherwise, exchanges information with Banner in low tones while Jade stands awkwardly in the worst light and tries to take the place in.

There's got to be some kind of metaphor here, about where the light touches and where it does not.

She tries to center it, herself, tries to find the start of this thread. First dials back to last December and then even further, further. Goes too far and comes back and then wavers and settles on the exact, precise, specific moment when she first saw Letha: the girls’ bathroom, Henderson High, senior year. When she knew the most important piece of the narrative puzzle was clicking right into place. There's a skip in the tape here. A bug, where the audio cuts and the video stripes over with static—maybe it's more like a DVD with a scratch on it and it just repeat and repeats and repeats. The bathroom stall door swinging open and Letha stepping through.

And again.

And again.

And again.

The only thing Jade had really wanted to know, what she'd kept on harping about to her lawyer, since she was going back to prison and there wasn't any way around that, was is Letha okay?

Fast forward the tape through all the gory parts—you've seen them all anyway, the fake stuff and the real, and the blood and guts aren't the core of the story anymore, never were—and what you've got is this. Jade, orphaned, untethered in the middle of a not-quite-familiar living room, her hands deep in the pockets of the coat she hasn't taken off. The living room isn't home but there are other living rooms, other houses, that are farther still from the ideal. She's gotten her second get out of jail free card. There aren't any left. Letha is somewhere upstairs, out of the hospital, home, and Banner says she's been waiting impatiently just to see Jade again.

[andreablythe]

Culture Consumption: October 2023

Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, television, and games. Books Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones is the second book of the Indian Lake Trilogy. Four years after the deadly events of the first book, Jennifer “Jade” Daniels is released released from when her murder conviction is overturned. She returns to her home in the rural lake town of Proofrock a different person.…