Horror novel, written by Stephen Graham Jones and published by Gallery/Saga Press in 2024. It is the third and final book in the Indian Lake trilogy, following "My Heart Is a Chainsaw," which was published in 2021, and "Don't Fear the Reaper," published in 2023.
Another four years have passed since Jade Daniels, the world's greatest Final Girl, survived another slasher massacre in her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, and then got sentenced to another stay in prison for taking the fall for someone else's mistakes. Now that she's back in Proofrock, the rebellious badass punk-rock half-Indian slasher fangirl has -- well, she's become a history teacher at the local high school. She's seeing a therapist to help her deal with the various traumas she's suffered -- both Jade and her therapist wear Ghostface masks because Jade thinks it'll help them have honest conversations. Jade's best friend, Letha Mondragon, is still in town, showing progress in recovering from her shattered jaw, still married to Banner Tompkins, now the county sheriff, and still caring for her daughter Adie, more adorable than ever before.
And Proofrock remains a town beset by slasher murders -- this year, right in time for Halloween. A couple of teenagers are found brutally murdered outside of town, alongside an unearthed grave. The long-lost bodies of Proofrock's previous sheriff and chief deputy are found in the wilderness. A parent waiting to pick up their kid from school is shockingly beheaded by someone approximately the size of a kindergartener -- or a Good Guy doll. On top of that, just as Jade realizes another serial killer is running loose, someone sets the forest on fire. Many townspeople are recruited as volunteer firefighters -- which is not a great idea when there's a slasher on the loose -- and even worse, they're asked to create fire breaks. In other words, a whole lot of people are given chainsaws.
And to make things even worse -- the dead rise. And their leader is Jade's eight-years-dead father.
With all these killers on the loose, with this much chaos and evil in the air, can Jade save her hometown, her friends, and herself? Or is this going to be Proofrock's Final Chapter?
As with the other books in this series, characterization is one of Jones' strengths, starting with the eternally awesome Jade Daniels. Deep down, she's still the horror loving fangirl who's lived through too many of her own horrors, but she's grown up considerably over the past few books. Would the Jade Daniels in high school ever imagine she'd be a history teacher? No, but the adult Jade Daniels is honoring her old history teacher, who respected and listened to her. And she's working on being a protector for her students, and on being someone they can look to the next time slashers come calling. But she's still not a perfect person, and the stress of her life leads to her overuse prescription mood stabilizers.
Letha remains Jade's best friend, a solid source of strength, and one of Jade's best connections to the rest of Proofrock, and her husband Banner, the new sheriff, gets a lot of development as a character. Jade never considered him much more than a useless jock, but they both have to rely on each other a lot during the chaos and bloodshed of this book, so Jade finds new appreciation for his dependable nature and devotion to Letha and Adie. And we get a lot of great character development from listening in on the conversations Jade has with both Letha and Banner.
There are plenty of other great characters. Some of them have been there in the other two books, and we get to see what finally happens to them. Some of them are brand new -- some of them end up being victims, some of them end up being villains, a few look like they could be heroes in their own right, and a few start out looking like trouble but manage to help Jade out, either by literally pulling her out of dangerous situations or by offering up clues to what's going on behind the scenes.
Cultural issues remain an important part of this series. Jade is -- very unusually for Idaho -- the only person with any Native ancestry in Proofrock. But Native American issues were more important in "Don't Fear the Reaper," with the vengeful Ojibwe slasher Dark Mill South murdering his way through Proofrock. Here, Jade met and fell in love with a Navajo woman named Isabel in prison; Isabel had been able to fill in the knowledge gaps Jade had with her Blackfeet heritage, so she's at least a bit more aware of that part of her ancestry.
Gentrification agains rears its ugly head, as more billionaires start working on building the tacky Terra Nova subdivision across the lake from Proofrock. There are now mega-yachts sailing on Indian Lake, and there's even an artificial remote-controlled island that's used to ferry construction equipment back and forth across the lake. And of course, very little of Terra Nova's money trickles down to the less wealthy people living in Proofrock.
The other books in this series have featured special non-narrative sections between chapters -- the best remembered of these were Jade's "Slasher 101" papers she wrote for school detailing the history of the slasher film in "My Heart Is a Chainsaw." The interstitial reports in this book are more sinister; they're reports from a shadowy private investigations firm detailing their surveillance and investigation of Jade, on behalf of an unnamed person. Who's behind the investigation? How extensive is their surveillance? Why do they have such a mad-on for Jade?
The body count in this book is a lot higher than the previous books, which is pretty damn impressive, but the gore drops a bit. There's still gore -- because it's a slasher -- but there are slightly fewer over-the-top splatterhound moments. Still, some of the goriest kills are particularly heartbreaking, and some of them are remarkably audacious. I am not at all sure, for example, that it would be good firefighting strategy to hand a bunch of civilians chainsaws that they're not particularly skilled at using and sending them out to cut firebreaks. Even without the interference of supernatural serial killers, there would be a very strong likelihood of personal injuries. But when you do add those supernatural serial killers, the mayhem level goes up significantly.
And as with the third part of any slasher trilogy, all bets are off as to who will manage to survive to the end of the book. Will Jade Daniels make it to the final credits? Or like so many Final Girls in slasher sequels, will she meet the killer's machete during the film's first reel? The slow journey of finding out who lives, who dies, and who was really hiding behind the hockey mask make this a read that's both horrifying and joyous -- and it makes it clear that by sticking the landing on this great trilogy, Stephen Graham Jones may be one of the new greats in American horror fiction.
horrorquest