Revenge, Final Girls and Indigenous Ghosts: Generic Manipulation in Stephen Graham Jones’s <i>My Heart is a Chainsaw</i>

Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones’s 2021 novel My Heart is a Chainsaw manipulates standard slasher movie tropes in order to expose their construction and often racialised underpinnings. This article looks at how Jones makes use of the slasher movie conventions of revenge as motivation for the antagonist and the character of the ‘final girl’ in two primary conflicts in the novel: Blackfeet protagonist Jade Daniels’s relationship to her abusive father and the massacre perpetuated by Stacey Graves, an Indigenous girl turned monstrous. By exposing various deficiencies in various slasher movie tropes, the novel affirms survivance by insisting on actual, complicated Indigenous presence within generic texts. Thus, this article fills a significant gap in scholarship on contemporary Indigenous engagement with subgeneric conventions within crime fiction.