Don't Fear the Reaper is Stephen Graham Jones's sequel to My Heart is a Chainsaw. As with the first one, I'm not sure I'm quite a big enough slasher fan to fully appreciate this and the characters other than Jade/Jennifer aren't as memorable for me, but Don't Fear the Reaper is still a really fun and interesting book overall.
I had to put this down for a few weeks to read other things, which probably resulted in losing a lot of my momentum. Especially for a long book that takes place over a day or two, which is a sequel to a book I read over two years ago, it was hard to keep track of exactly what was going on and who's who. I could have used a Dramatis Personae.
Another issue for me was that I really loved Jade in the first book, but here she comes back almost a different person, even using a different name, her "real" name "Jennifer." Still, some of her youthful slasher-fan panache is taken over by another character, and she herself gets some of it back toward the end.
Wait, so what happens? Jade (now Jennifer) returns home from prison several years after the events of the first book. Meanwhile, a serial killer called Dark Mill South is heading to town as part of his murder spree. The serial killer sees this as revenge for the execution of dozens of Dakota men 150 years earlier (a real-life historical event in which 38 Dakota men were hanged in Minnesota in 1862, which is still the largest single execution in US history and something I only briefly learned about as a public school student in Minnesota in the 80's and 90's).
Of course, Jennifer/Jade and the rest of the townsfolk (at least those who survived the first book) get caught up in Dark Mill South's slasherific mayhem during an intense blizzard. For various it's-me-not-you reasons, this one lagged for me in the middle as I got lost in the (too many?) POVs, but it picked up in the last quarter or so. I don't want to spoil the ending, and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what to think about it. So, I'll leave it there.
Like all slashers, the most obvious philosophical point is that slashers represent the inexorable flow of time and the inevitability of death. Interestingly, we do get chapters from the serial killer's point of view: what does Death think he's doing?
Another favorite part were a few discussions about characters not knowing what genre they're in. We all yell at characters in horror movies, but if you think about it, they don't know they're in a horror movie, so why would they act as if they are? One mild criticism of these books is that there's no reason to think slasher-movie-logic would have anything to do with real life murder, but on the other Jones does deal with this to some extent (most explicitly in these scenes) and besides, I should lighten up.
Perhaps another deep point is about historical injustices and effects on the present day. Our serial killer is not literally a ghost of one one of the executed Dakota men (I don't think?), but still: what do we (white Americans, the US government, etc.) owe their Dakota descendants or other Native people? And how do the injustices of the past still live with us today? Is the past really the past? How do Native people today navigate their own cultural identities while also being part of a larger society? I finished reading this during Native American Heritage Month, so I was definitely thinking about some of these topics.
But like most slashers, there's really just something fun about Don't Fear the Reaper, even if we don't entirely understand why.
PS: Definitely listen to Jones's several appearances on The Kingcast--he's always great!
See also my Goodreads review.
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