Jason Vorhees On My Mind

Stephen Graham Jones dedicated My Heart is a Chainsaw and Don’t Fear the Reaper, the first two installments in his Indian Lake trilogy, to horror filmmakers — Debra Hill and Wes Craven, respectively. He dedicates the final chapter, The Angel of Indian Lake, to a horror character: Jason Voorhees.

“for this kid named Jason. I would have swam out for you, man. we all would have,” Jones writes.

Readers who recall their Horror 101 will note that the killer in the original Friday the 13th was not Jason. It was his mother Pamela, who avenges Jason’s drowning by killing every camp counselor who was supposed to be watching her son. The hockey mask slasher franchise all started with a mother’s grief and anguish.

In addition to Jones’ dedication, Indian Lake (like Chainsaw) has a lot of Friday the 13th on its mind — lakes, boats, parent/child relationships, familial grief, lots and lots (and lots) of dead bodies, gnarly violence, and communities turning a blind eye to suffering. But while other horror authors might have gone straight for the shock factor and left it at that, Jones uses the violence in this trilogy capper to meditate on what we owe each other and whose stories we tell.

Indian Lake picks up four years after the events of Reaper. Jade Daniels returns home to Proofrock, Idaho after serving time in prison, taking the fall for her friend Letha Mondragon. Her life is turning around. She’s in therapy. She’s got a job as a high school history teacher, taking up the mantle from Mr. Holmes, the only adult who ever understood her slasher obsession in high school.

But, just like clockwork, her return coincides with another round of horrific killings. And this time, the suspect(s) hearken back to the old Proofrock legend of Stacey Graves, AKA the Lake Witch. Is she back to take her revenge? Or is something else afoot?

Indian Lake remixes and re-contextualizes many of the elements of Chainsaw (like any good third entry in a slasher series would do). But the big difference here is that Jones writes Indian Lake from Jade’s perspective, the first in the trilogy to do so.

That’s because Jones cares about who writes history. It’s no accident that Jade becomes a history teacher, and that her inner monologue is full of historical references to Proofrock, local legends, slasher films, the horror genre, and her own family ties. The Angel of Indian Lake is a legacy sequel, but with a twist: It’s concerned with the importance of characters passing on the stories of their own legacies, on their own terms.

Jones imbues Jade’s inner voice with such humor and poetry that it becomes all the more shocking whenever a death happens. Jones will reference a beautiful poem about buffalo roaming one moment and then chop off a character’s head with a helicopter blade the next. This is still a slasher story, and the final chapter of one at that, so no character is safe. (The villain reveal is a particularly clever bit of slasher movie homage that you won’t see coming.)

From the first page of Chainsaw, this trilogy has been on the side of the outcast and disenfranchised— whether they be a Final Girl, slasher victim, or mistaken for a slasher. By placing the narrative in Jade’s head, Jones finally gives us a look at her perspective as she comes to grips with the fact that maybe she’s supposed  to mentor and protect Proofrock’s final girls instead of becoming one herself.

By the book’s emotional ending, readers will be wanting more, but Jones has said this is where Jade’s story ends. Jones himself is on a roll: His next novel, I Was a Teenage Slasher, hits bookshelves this summer.

(S&S, Saga Press, March 26, 2024)