14. Silver Nitrate

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia 

10. Kid Power! (Spectacular Optical Book One)

Edited by Kier-La Janisse & Paul Corupe

7. My Heart Is a Chainsaw

By Stephen Graham Jones    

When I heard about My Heart is a Chainsaw—a meta-horror novel about a First Nations high school misfit recognizing signs that a serial killer is preying on the small town Proofrock because she happens to be obsessed with slasher movies—I knew in my bones that I had to read it!!  I’ve watched many of the slashers that My Heart Is a Chainsaw constantly references.  I was also curious to read something by S.G. Jones as his previous work sound so promising.  Last Christmas, I saw the hardcover at Dark Carnival but hesitated about the extravagance (glad I listened to my instincts back then).  But when Paul Tremblay name-dropped Jones as a talented writer, my curiosity got the better of me and I requested My Heart Is a Chainsaw for my birthday.

From a review:

There is not a lot going on in Proofrock, (which MUST BE a reference to T.S. Eliot’s first published poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which, according to Wiki, is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said “to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual” and “represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment.”) Jade provides that inner take here. She certainly experiences isolation, and endures frustration and impotence, not to mention personal abuse. Jade is both wishing for the slasher to be real and for him not to be real. Great, if it is. You were right all along. Take a bow. On the other hand, you are likely to be killed. Hmmm, decisions, decisions. She is actually eager for the inevitable bloodbath to begin, finding this strangely exciting. Well, maybe not so strange for a kid with suicidal impulses. She’s got her reasons.

I so so SO much wanted to enjoy MHiaC, but sadly, this turned out to be the most disappointing read this year.  First, I couldn’t get into the narrative style, a first person plural delivery apparently inspired by Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides.  The novel was told from the POV of our young protagonist, Jade, BUT via the third person in a stream-of-consciousness inner babbling of a typical 17 yo girl.  Jones tried so very hard to emulate a tough yet vulnerable teenage girl in denial of her past trauma, and it was awkward as hell.  At some point I realized it wasn’t just the self-conscious writing style that was the problem, the story was simply not very well written. 

With a thin plot and characterization, including the under-developed relationships Jade had with Mr Holmes, Letha Mondragon and Shooting Glasses, the novel still clocked in at almost 400 pages.  What could be taking up so many pages?  There were the essays that Jade wrote for her teacher Mr Holmes – which were interesting at first, as they provided the necessary background for Proofrock’s gruesome history and legends.  But the essays, like the novel, kept rehashing the same content over and over.  The meandering mess of MHIAC could have been edited down to half its length and would’ve come out stronger.

And the ending was so… abrupt.  Jade was trying to stop the wildfire from reaching Proofrock by breaking into the control station of the dam and manipulating a bunch of controls to send the floodwaters to quench the fire.  She saw a mama bear and cub fleeing not just the forest fire but an enraged male grizzly.  And then the story just ended.  I’ve read enough novels that experimented with style and/or structure, and can distinguish good writing that happen to not work with my individual taste, but MHIAC just came across as poorly written to me.  Its messy execution ruined what was a potentially awesome premise.

What was predictable:  that Jade, instead of Letha, turned out to be the final girl after all (though Letha was mistakenly regarded as the hero).

What I considered to be a “cheat”:  having two killers – the human one, Theo Mondragon, and a supernatural one, Stacey Graves. 

Nonsensical plot devices:   

• Theo’s motive for his killing spree didn’t make any sense… so he messily murdered a bunch of people to cover up his white collar crimes?  That’s a lot at stake for such a visible community member, successful businessman and family guy.  And he’s willing to kill his own daughter?  Did he just switch on “Psycho Mode”? 
• The young Dutch couple as the first human sacrifices.  When one of the bodies was discovered, it made no sense that Proofrock wasn’t crawling with federal and international authorities coordinating and overseeing an extensive search for the other body, not to mention the victims’ families arriving from the Netherlands.  But there was nothing like that.  A missing young Dutch couple who met their demise via obvious foul play in small town America would’ve attracted international attention.  It made no sense to not portray that and to see some of that through Jades’ eyes.
• As for Stacey Graves, at least there was an attempt made to explain why she started killing generations later, ie. the Terra Nova development which resulted in the disturbance of the protected park.  

From a review:  Indian Lake was the place where, during the town’s initial period of settlement, a young Native girl named Stacey Graves was outed as a witch when a childish prank went wrong. Graves is rumored to be behind a series of murders in town, including a spree of deaths which occurred at the now abandoned summer camp — dubbed “Camp Blood” by the locals — just years prior to Jade’s birth.

The playing and flouting of genre conventions was also annoyingly inconsistent.  Theo was a red herring with the actual big bad killer being undead Stacey Graves.  I was fine with that, but throughout the novel, it kept toying with the idea that a slasher movie was being played out "for real" (which was what Jade really wanted) so that Jade, who knows the genre “rules” by heart, can use them to her advantage.  Then fun meta-horror gimmicks kept getting counter-balanced by hard reality, to remind Jade (and the reader) that she’s in the Real World.  Either Jones couldn’t decide which way to go or he wanted to have it both ways, but in doing so, failed to achieve a satisfying narrative arc.  Another theory, which is common in the mystery genre, that in order to keep the reader guessing who the killer(s) are, the author can follow, or not follow, the rules of the game. 

When I finally got to the big massacre, it felt underwhelming, despite the carnage and bloodshed.  The main reason was that I simply didn't care about any of the characters.  To add salt on the wound, there was no satisfying conclusion for the reader either!  And I wasn’t alone about the ending.

After the fiasco that was The House in the Cerulean Sea, I still haven't learned my lesson. Where did I go wrong?  First, I got mislead by Paul Tremblay when he name-dropped Jones.  He had raved about Sarah Gran's Come Closer, which thankfully turned out to be a great read. Perhaps Jones’ previous efforts are better?  The horror homage premise of MHIAC was also irresistible to me and I fell for the marketing, bloody hook line and sinker.  I even looked at all the glowing 5 star reviews on Goodreads.  There was only a small minority with the opinion:  “I don’t know what it is but I really struggle to connect with SGJ’s books. I want to love them but I just can’t?!”   Maybe younger readers appreciate SGJ better?  I should learn my lesson now and improve on my due diligence with better research in future.  There’s a risk in knowing too much about the plot, but in the end, I could save myself hours, if not days, of wasted time.

It's unfortunate because I want to read more fiction by indigenous writers.  When Olman heard how disappointed I was with this book, he highly recommended Eden Robinson's Son of a Trickster, which is available at our local library. 

6. House of Psychotic Women

 By Kier-La Janisse   

I first knew of Kier-la Janisse when her Cinemuerte festival launched a few years after I finished film school. I remember attending screenings at the Blinding Light Cinema in Gastown, though not exactly what I saw. I do remember going to a rare screening of Zulawski’s Possession as well as a screening of Female Convict 701: Scorpion, both organized and introduced by Janisse before the audience. I can’t find online info about them (back then events weren’t really posted online!), but I believe Possession screened in Gastown and Female Convict screened at the Vogue theatre on Granville.

Obvs back then I didn’t realize how special and unique those screenings were. Until I read her 2012 memoir, House of Psychotic Women, I didn’t realize how much horror movies had shaped Janisse’s life into the singular individual she is today. Perhaps more accurately, it was more how the trajectory of Janisse’s early life had shaped her appreciation and fascination for horror and exploitation films.

And of course, Zulawki’s Possession was the film that first sparked Janisse’s obsession with horror and female psychology.

“In that first half Janisse circles back again and again to Andrezj Zulawski’s 1981 Possession, obsessed and enraptured by its “hypnotic cinematography” and “deep blue hues.” The film becomes an anchor for much of the analysis, the film that sparked a lifelong passion — her interest is hardly academic, no mere formal fascination. In an early passage that displays her insightful, potent prose, she writes,

‘There was something terrible in that film, a desperation I recognized in myself, in my ability to communicate effectively, and the frustration that would lead to despair, anger and hysteria.’ — House of Psychotic Women

Because of who she is, it’s no surprise that Janisse couldn’t write an ordinary memoir either. The full title is House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films, and it truly is a unique hybrid of autobiographical and scholarly film analysis seen through a very distinct personal lens. In the decade since its publication, there hasn’t been anything else quite like this book either.

Janisse’s early life was, unsurprisingly, marked by family dysfunction, instability, trauma and much unhappiness. You can check all the tumultuous factors off the list: being adopted, abandoned by an older stepsister who ran away, her parents separating when she was young. One time, she even witnessed her single mom being assaulted at home. There’s more, but I’m not going to list out all the awful things that happened because those things don’t entirely define a person. However, Janisse was honest enough to admit that for the longest time, she did let those bad things define her and almost ruin her life. At some point, she managed to pull herself together and make something of herself. Her love of cinema helped her find a job at Black Dog Video and that support system allowed her to eventually finish her education and go from there.

This review sums up HOPW well: 

“Horror films reflect some core truths about the way we live, the trials and tribulations that we endure, and our individual relationships with a world that seems, at best, indifferent to our well-being and, at worst, actively hostile. Not everyone feels this way, but a lot of us do. And there’s a deep satisfaction in seeing your experiences and perceptions honestly reflected back at you, even if said experiences and perceptions aren’t totally pleasant. It’s a reminder that although the world can be a hard place, you’re not alone in it.”

Olman and I actually saw Janisse at the 2012 Fantasia film festival when she was there to launch House of Psychotic Women. She was sitting quietly in the main lobby of the Concordia Hall building with modest stacks of HOPW laid out on the table before her. At the time, she looked like how I remembered her from my days in Vancouver.  Yet it didn’t even occur to me to purchase her book!  Fortunately, Olman keyed into the unique opportunity by purchasing the book from Janisse herself.  Like me, Olman has the tsundoku-esque habit of buying nice books and forgetting to read them, so House of Psychotic Women sat unread in a shelf for years.

At some point, I remembered the book and started reading it around 2019, though very intermittently. During the 2020 pandemic, my reading pace picked up again, and my film consumption sky rocketed. Thanks to Shudder, Criterion and other creative ways of acquiring digital meda, I was able to watch obscure horror films that have been on my list for years and years, ie. Marnie, Secret Ceremony, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, L’intérieur. I wanted to read about the films I watched and it made sense that I’d seek out HOPW again. Olman was happy to see me reading HOPW as he didn’t think he'd ever get around to reading it. So I now claim HOPW as mine!

Although I finished the memoir over a week ago, there's a film compendium that takes up about 40% of the book’s content. Janisse provides a short review for each film and there are, at minimum, 150 films! It’ll take me a while to read through them all, which I want to do and savour.

Here’s one I found amusing for Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972, Italy):

“It has often been said that the stringent Catholicism of Italy and Spain contributed greatly to the luridness of their horror films, the sleaziness of their comedies, the predatory nature of their thrillers. It’s no surprise: the Catholic religion is a staunch advocate of repression and self-denial, which usually just results in exactly the kind of sexually transgressive behaviour they are trying to warn against.”

Reading HOPW has definitely influenced the films I’ve been watching during the pandemic. And it’s been interesting to read Janisse’s take on films that I’ve already watched, not to mention a slew of new films to put on my to watch list as I make my way through the compendium.

As I’m writing this, I realized Janisse also made her first documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, which I missed at 2021 Fantasia.

It’s just as well, because when I saw that it was (thankfully) also available on Shudder, it’s well over 3 hours long! I've started to watching it piecemeal and it’s packed with a LOT of films, most of which are quite obscure and/or forgotten, most of which I’ve never heard of and will probably never set eyes on.

Then not long after, I got sidetracked with Eli Roth’s History of Horror episodes, which are geared towards more mainstream horror afficianados. It didn’t take me long to finish all three seasons, while I’m not even hallway through Janisse’s Folk Horror doc. Shame! But to my pleasant surprise, Janisse was featured as a talking head expert on Roth’s series! So it was fantastic to see her there with the likes of Roth, Tarantino, and Stephen King.

P.S.

Fantasia Film Festival announced their 2022 lineup. Kier-La will be back to launch and promote an expanded edition of HOPW to celebrate its 10th anniversary of publication! It features a new cover (which Janisse prefers), reviews for 100 new films, and more glossy colour photos of cinematic female psychoses. If you pre-order, you’ll receive the limited edition with a CD of Janisse reading The Yellow Wallpaper set to originally composed music.