Andrew Kuchling<p>DON'T FEAR THE REAPER, by Stephen Graham Jones, is a sequel to MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW, picking up a few years after the violent massacre that caps the first book. The protagonist Jade Daniels was sent to prison for supposedly murdering her father, as caught on video, but the case has been overturned & she's been set free to return home to her home town of Proofrock, Idaho.</p><p>But at the same time as her return home, a serial killer named Dark Mill South is being transported in a convoy nearby... and escapes in the middle of a snowstorm. The town is now being snowed in and high-schoolers start getting killed again, in new messy and memorable ways. Jade meets Cinnamon and Ginger Baker, twin sisters who she rescued in the first book, but Ginger is institutionalized and Cinnamon may be a new Final Girl herself. Jade's beloved history teacher has been replaced by a new one, Mr Armitage, who has his own obsession with slasher-movie history.</p><p>I enjoyed reading this but didn't like it as much as the first book. One problem was Mr Armitage: Jade's relentless quoting of obscure slashers in the first book defined her character, but having a *second* character in this book also do that got tedious. (I did like that Jade's movie knowledge was 5 years out of date -- she's been in prison, after all!) </p><p>It's also intricately cryptic; there are a lot of deaths, caused by different people and entities, and it was hard for me to understand how everything fits together. Maybe this is deliberate ambiguity, though.</p><p>I did like the increasingly kind relationship between Jade & the elderly Sheriff Hardy, and also the supernatural aspects of the plot, which are sort of a variation on book #1's Lake Witch but are rearranged in a way that I found pretty poignant. The whole book concludes on a sad and poignant note, really. It was tough to disentangle the plot, but I'm still in for book #3.</p><p><a href="https://dmv.community/tags/books" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>books</span></a> <a href="https://dmv.community/tags/bookstodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>bookstodon</span></a> <a href="https://dmv.community/tags/horror" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>horror</span></a> <a href="https://dmv.community/tags/slasher" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>slasher</span></a> <a href="https://dmv.community/tags/StephenGrahamJones" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>StephenGrahamJones</span></a> <a href="https://dmv.community/tags/DontFearTheReaper" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DontFearTheReaper</span></a></p>