ROAD TO STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES’ OFF THE RESERVATION: An Obsessive’s Fiction Review Column
Last time we spoke, I recommended you read my picks for what I called the SGJ Starter Pack—Night of the Mannequins; Killer on the Road/The Babysitter Lives; I Was a Teenage Slasher—and here you are now, ready for more. That, my friends, is the typical experience of a reader falling in love with the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones. When I discovered my first Jones book (one I’ll name in a future post) over six years ago, I too was hungry for more. I read eight (8!) of his books in quick succession—one of which was this column’s very first pick, Night of the Mannequins—a single-author binge I’ve never replicated until this year with, again, Stephen Graham Jones. He has a way of pulling you in, close to the characters and the inner details of their lives, while at the same time expanding your imagination greatly. In this writer’s humble estimation, Jones is singular in his expansive readability.
Come 2021, Jones—already in my mind the master of slasher—hit us with his thesis statement on the slasher genre. Seeing that, coupled with it being the first of a trilogy, I felt I wasn’t fully prepared to read it yet. Even when the full trilogy was available, I saved it for whatever reason. It felt too… important, weighty, I don’t know. I’m ashamed to say I waited to finally read the subject of today’s column until a few months ago, when Cemetery Dance accepted my pitch for this whole column series. And that’s why I’m including them so early.
What I’m trying to say is: Don’t be like me. Don’t wait.
Slasher 101 with Professor Jones
MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW
The Indian Lake Trilogy: Book One
Published 2021 by Saga Press
Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, Locus Award for Best Horror Novel
There is a shirt popular with the horror reader community that totes the slogan “Jade Daniels is my Final Girl” (designed by fellow SGJ bookclub member, Greg Greene). All one has to do to understand the heart-on-sleeve passion of this sincerely held belief is read My Heart Is a Chainsaw.
Book One of the Indian Lake Trilogy introduces us to Jade Daniels, 17-year-old local of small-town Proofrock, Idaho, and resident slasher cognoscente. On the surface, it would seem that this teenage delinquent is obsessed in the same way as Jamie Kennedy’s character in 1996’s Scream—aka, as a meta narrative device to point out to the reader what genre tropes we’re playing with here. But for Jade Daniels, slasher movies go so much deeper than that.
When a real-life slasher shows up in Proofrock, Jade is the only one who can read the signs. But even when the bodies start to pile up, all anyone sees Jade as is the girl who cried slasher. So when she identifies this slasher’s Final Girl, she knows it’s her job to usher Letha Mondragon to victory before everyone she knows bloodies the waters of Indian Lake.
Staggered throughout the narrative are “Slasher 101” essays written by Jade herself, invaluable for the uninitiated. But the real heart of this story—the My Heart of that brilliant title—is not the slasher genre (the Is a Chainsaw, as it were), but Jade herself. Never before has a character felt so real to me; by the end, you just want to reach through the pages and hug this imperfect, prickly, intelligent young woman who has been failed by every adult and institution in her life. Her heart is a chainsaw, and by the end the reader will want to yank the pull cord and let it tear through these pages.
DON’T FEAR THE REAPER
The Indian Lake Trilogy: Book Two
Published 2023 by Saga Press
British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel
You could be forgiven for assuming My Heart Is a Chainsaw could be treated as a stand-alone, like The Shining or Dune (don’t come at me)… but I’m here to tell you that you’d be making a grave mistake.
Don’t Fear the Reaper catches up with Jade a few years later, throws Proofrock into the middle of a historic snowstorm, and introduces a truly terrifying slasher: hook-handed, escaped convict, serial killer Dark Mill South. Unlike Chainsaw, the bodies begin to fall immediately, and it never lets up for poor Jade.
There are two major points about this book that truly blew me away. The first is the sheer depth and complexity Jones excavates from the history and interrelationships of his fictional town of Proofrock and its surrounding environs, Indian Lake, Camp Blood, and Terra Nova. The people, the places, and their histories all feel so rich, so real. For me, this place feels more real than Castle Rock, more real than Gotham. Characters haven’t lived and breathed so clearly in my head since my childhood. Several points during my read of Reaper, it was all I could do to just sit back and wonder at how Jones pulled this off.
Speaking of “How did he do this?!”—the second point that blew me away is, to me, nothing short of a magic trick. This, more than anything, made me understand what King meant when he said writing is telepathy, that books are “a uniquely portable magic” (On Writing, 2000). The character dialogue of a Jones book is always top-notch, but in this trilogy, he pulls off something I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced. The strength of Jones’ dialogue is in the subtext; his characters never actually say what they mean, yet they still convey it, much like in real life. It’s like contour drawing, where you draw around an object rather than tracing its lines directly. Jones’ Indian Lake Trilogy takes this even further. There are so many storylines within storylines here, so many subplots he’s working with, and at one point in my reading it hit me that there were entire plot threads that were only apparent in the subtext—entire subplots he never actually puts on the damn page, but nonetheless are definitely there, in the contours of what his characters are saying.
Said another way? Magic.
THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE
The Indian Lake Trilogy: Book Three
Published 2024 by Saga Press
The copy on the inside flap of my hardcover edition of The Angel of Indian Lake opens with the following text: “The final installment in the most lauded trilogy in the history of horror literature.”
Believe the hype.
I’m not going to share anything about the premise of this book, because the first two books are so integral to what Jones is doing here, but I will share one detail about the third book in this trilogy: Unlike Chainsaw and Reaper, whose main narratives are written in third-person POV, Angel is in first-person, straight from Jade herself. Meta-textually, it feels like Jade has fully grown into herself, and is ready to take us along on her journey first-hand. It’s a subtle change, but incredibly effective.
The Angel of Indian Lake really is the culmination of an epic that grows and grows, spans many years, gives a whole history of this town and these characters, and I am so grateful to have had three full books to live in this place. Why don’t horror novels do this more? Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of wonderful horror novel series out there, but there is definitely a clear distinction between hit horror fiction—typically standalones—and horror on the big screen, where seven- and eight-film (and more!) franchises reign. By the time I reached Angel, it truly felt like a singular reading experience. I didn’t want it to end. These characters were my friends, this town was my home. Even now, writing this, I’m itching to dive back in and re-live the whole trilogy.
I feel like, at this point in today’s column, any critical analysis I may have had has now collapsed, and I’m just over here ranting (like Jade) about my favorite slashers. I could say so much about these books, could talk about them for hours. I want a whole TV series adaptation of these books; I want them printed on my brain lobes. Most of all, I want all you horror fans out there to read the Indian Lake Trilogy, too.
I want Jade Daniels to be everyone’s Final Girl.
Dr. Jones, sir, if you’re reading this: thank you.
Tune in next time, when I explore the short fiction of Stephen Graham Jones. Till then… go find a copy of My Heart Is a Chainsaw and let Jade teach you about slashers.
Spencer Hamilton
OUR ROAD MAP
All the Beautiful Sinners
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
It Came from Del Rio
The Ones Who Got Away
Zombie Bake-Off
Three Miles Past: Stories
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth
The Least of My Scars
Sterling City
The Gospel of Z
States of Grace
After the People Lights Have Gone Off
Mongrels
Mapping the Interior
Night of the Mannequins *
The Only Good Indians
My Heart Is a Chainsaw **
Don’t Fear the Reaper **
The Angel of Indian Lake **
I Was a Teenage Slasher *
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Killer on the Road/The Babysitter Lives *
Off the Reservation, out October 13, 2026
OUR ROAD MAP KEY
* SGJ Starter Pack
** Slasher 101 with Professor Jones
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SPENCER HAMILTON is a queer horror author living in Pennsylvania. His fiction includes the novel The Fear and novellas Welcome to Smileyland and Sister Funtime. His short fiction has been collected in Kitchen Sink and I Will Devour You and Other Promises, and has appeared in several anthologies, most recently Punk Goes Horror II from Truborn Press. He is the editor of the queer horror anthology There’s More of Us Than You Know. You can find him on Instagram as @spencer.hamilton.books.
