So this post is going up a little late. As I’ve much written about, it can be hard to choose my topic each week and this last one was no exception. I watched one early 80s folk horror about which I’d heard really good things, and while I appreciated aspects of its concept and enjoyed its madcap weirdness, certain weaknesses of its execution kept me at arm’s length and I just couldn’t get into it. I watched an absolutely gorgeous arthouse horror from a filmmaker I’d long had a blind spot for, but I need to rewatch it to order my thoughts before writing and while I loved it on initial viewing, watching it again immediately just felt a bit like homework (but I’ll do it soon – I promise). I even made it out to the cinema and saw Cocaine Bear, which I rather enjoyed, but don’t have sufficient thoughts about to fill a whole post.
Past that, I’ve been doing a bit of travel around Croatia, where I’m currently “workationing” (hooray for remote work), and that means lots of time sitting at cafes reading, and in the last couple of days, I burned through the end of a book and having enjoyed it so much, found myself going back to the beginning and almost re-reading the whole thing the next day. So let’s talk about that. Let’s return to Proofrock, Idaho for the second installment of Stephen Graham Jones’s “Lake Witch Trilogy,” Don’t Fear the Reaper.
Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023)
I think I’m going to have to do this in two parts. To do the book justice, it’s necessary to get into certain details which could rather spoil its reading. But at the same time, I really liked it and would like to offer some explication of its value to potential readers. Therefore, I will go into it first sans spoilers. And then, after a break, will discuss key elements and later revelations for a select readership that has already finished the book.
Last summer, during a few weeks of discussing the concept and some stand out examples of “the final girl,” I devoted a post to the first book of this cycle, My Heart is a Chainsaw. At the time, I had no idea that it was even part of a trilogy, so satisfyingly did it reach its conclusion (and from an interview I heard, I have the impression that it was written as a stand-alone piece, which the author later decided to return to and build on). When I heard this volume was coming out, I was even initially hesitant, feeling that the original hadn’t needed continuation (a sentiment that often arises when it comes to Slasher franchises), but I’m so glad I picked this up. Graham Jones manages to really deepen and expand upon themes of the first work, very satisfyingly allowing characters to grow and mature, while also exploring how the effects of the first novel ripple through this town and the lives of its citizens, surfacing in a new explosion of violence.
And on top of that, the book just feels like a sprint. Whereas Chainsaw took its time, getting us behind the eyes of Jade, its narrator and eventual final girl, navigating us through a rich collection of characters and contexts that all set up possible causes of and motives for the deaths that were occurring, interspersed with her pontifications on Slasher theory, the lens through which she viewed her world, before Jade had to finally rise to the occasion, stepping into the shoes of the idealized role she’d never thought herself qualified for in a final act blood bath, Reaper just hits the ground running and doesn’t let up till it gets where it’s going. Full of intense, cinematic sequences, it is a page turner, as they say – an exciting, often gory, emotional roller coaster that left me pumping my fist in the air following its triumphant last sentence. In the lead up to releasing Reaper, I started seeing t-shirts with the slogan “Jade Daniels is my final girl” popping up on social media – for good reason. She’s an easy character to rally around.
In many ways, this functions as a Slasher sequel, and it’s a good one. As Randy enthuses in Scream 2, there’s a bigger body count and it’s gorier with more elaborate death scenes. But in other ways, it gives space to elements that wouldn’t ordinarily be focused on (not to mention hosting characters with a degree of self-aware genre knowledge that puts poor Randy to shame). Four years have passed since the events of the first book and their weight hangs heavily on all those who survived. The town has generally recovered since the Lake Witch slayings and subsequent fire and flood, but beneath the surface, the town of Proofrock is haunted by those who were lost, by the horrors the survivors witnessed, by wounds that linger, both physical and otherwise. Into this space, Jade returns, having been subjected to a lengthy trial following her heroic and cathartic turn in the climax of the first book. No good deed goes unpunished.
Notably, Graham Jones has allowed her to change, to grow up a bit. Throughout the first volume, she sees everything through her “Slasher-goggles,” having embraced slasher films and tropes as a kind of coping mechanism to deal with a slate of traumatic experiences she’d been subjected to. In seeing things through as she does in the first book, she is allowed some personal resolution – some things are laid to rest, or at least are contained at the bottom of the lake. Though it is so unfair that she alone was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for her actions, the fact that the trial took her out of her once toxic context seems to have been good for her. She is in a more stable place. She doesn’t need to lean on the mythic resonance of her favorite films as she once had.
Ironically though, other characters have now done their homework, having lived through their own real life slasher film, and Jade (or Jennifer as she would now rather be called) is no longer the only one so versed in the lore of the sub-genre. In fact, she would rather not dwell on the material she once depended on, and resists others’ attempts to make her view new events through her old lens. Fascinatingly, these others each have a different relationship to the material. For one, it is research for survival – determined to endure whatever is thrown at her, she has obsessively worked through every slasher and tawdry thriller she can find. Another seems to have shared a similar history with Jade, living through childhood trauma and mythologizing the figures of slasher cinema, but whereas Jade was destined for the heroic, he has become a sleazy predator. Finally, a third character seems to have studied these filmic texts as models for their own cycle of murders – the movies, as Billy Loomis once said, not making psychos, but making psychos “more creative.”
Into the mix as well, comes the nigh-mythic serial killer, Dark Mill South, a hulking silent butcher right out of a later installment of Friday the 13th, Halloween, or Hatchet. He is an intimidating figure and the scenes in which Jade confronts him are some of the most gripping in the book. Also, just as her Native American (Blackfeet) heritage has done so much to shape (and sour) her relationship with her community and family, his has also contributed to the shadow he casts, particularly the implication that his many, varied, horrific killings are all to be taken as vengeance for the mass hanging in 1862 of 38 Sioux warriors, ordered by Lincoln. Dark Mill South is clearly a monster – he has done horrific things (and the time we spend inside his perspective does nothing to soften that view), but the sense that he could be enacting a kind of vengeance for such a violence of the past, that his crimes are in fact a form of justice, as brutal and implacable as an act of nature, helps contextualize him as a Slasher killer in a classic-mythic sense.
Thus, though she has successfully moved on in a number of ways, when high school kids start showing up dead all over town, just as she’s getting home, Jade is pulled back in, and will once again have to wade through a river of gore to protect those she cares about. But that is one thing that’s different this time. Four years earlier, she’d been so isolated, the weird horror kid from a “bad family” crying “slasher” to deaf ears, her relationships mostly antagonistic. This time, she does have a small community around her. Most of the town still may view her with suspicion at best, but she is now tied to some other survivors of the last massacre. She actually has a couple of friends and loved ones who she does not want to lose, for whom she will fight.
And perhaps at this point, before we get into any discussion of later developments, it’s a good time to stop if you haven’t read the book and think you might at all like to. If so, do start with My Heart is a Chainsaw. Enjoy.
Ok, I’ll assume if you’re still here, you’ve either read both Chainsaw and Reaper or never will. So now I’m just going to geek out a bit. One thing I really appreciated was how in her roaring death cry to pierce Dark Mill South and “find the off switch,” I flashed on the mama bear at the end of the first book. Jade spent her young life failed by her family (and worse), but in this moment, she can do for her chosen family what wasn’t done for her. It’s a lovely moment. As is the denouement regarding Sheriff Hardy and Melanie. If only that meant the actual killer had been brought down.
In the first book, there is much discussion of red herrings in the Slasher genre, particularly in those that revolve around the mystery of the killer’s identity (which I’d hazard to say is actually most of them – the silent, named, masked killers cast a long shadow, but far more are unseen murderers waiting for a final act reveal). The first time around, Jade, through her goggles, was endlessly trying to figure out what was going on. Theory after theory fell flat though because life isn’t a clean story and, well, there were actually a few killers to reckon with (in both cases, these elements are repeated). This time, even though clues are littered throughout the book, and Jade and Letha even have an extended discussion about “final girls who are actually the killer,” it’s still so easy to get distracted by the looming figure of Dark Mill South, who does, in fact, finish some kids off, but otherwise is a minor contributor to the mayhem, a convenient cover story who just happened to be brought in by the storm at just the right time. This misdirection begins before the story does, with the quote from Carol J. Clover about how the killer is invariably male.
In contrast, in both the Melanie/Spirit Elk and the Cinnamon/Ginger (or was it always only Cinnamon?) storylines, the past is coming to bear and revenge is being dealt, whether for complicity in one death many years ago (classic slasher stuff) or rooted in a twisted sense of balancing the scales following the last slaughter and a misplaced blame for the one person who actually managed to stop it last time. And while Dark Mill South is in the ground and Hardy and Melanie are reunited beneath the ice, Cinnamon is still out there, free and unaccused. It leaves things intriguingly open for the final volume. While at the end of the first book, I felt everything had been quite wrapped up, this time, I am rather waiting for the final installment, and wondering what new repercussions will follow from this one. Also – how much of a time jump will there be this time? It seems unlikely that Jade will avoid at least some length of a prison sentence.
I loved this book for many of the same reasons that I so enjoyed the first. It is both a successful, interesting, fun thriller, and at the same time, such a love letter to a much maligned genre that so many of us take so much pleasure and find such deep satisfaction in. I love how through Jade, and now also through Letha, Armitage, and Cinnamon, these “dead teenager pictures,” are revealed as emotional texts, as therapeutic, as inspiring, as art, as important. How many movies have shown some variant of sportsball as a metaphor for life, as a vehicle for a mythic hero’s journey, as the crucible in which identity is formed? We all find meaning where we do, and in finding it, create it.
And that is what we have here. It is so satisfying seeing a character like Jade, who has latched onto these works of fiction (which the general public and ‘reputable critics’ would scorn) for survival, go through so much, suffer but still be compelled to investigate, fight but also be driven to understand, and ultimately grow into a powerful woman who can and will do what is necessary, whether that means killing the killer with an appropriately phallic weapon, helping a loved one find peace, or taking the fall for a friend. It’s moving to go on the journey with her, to witness her becoming.
It’s also really fun.