“It’s time to say goodbye to Jade Daniels,” reads a quote from author Stephen Graham Jones on the back of “The Angel of Indian Lake,” his new horror novel published by Saga Press on Tuesday, March 26.
The book is the final in a trilogy that began with 2021’s “My Heart is a Chainsaw” and continued into 2022’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper.” The series shares the story of Jade, a half-Native American teenager with a wealth of slasher film knowledge who lives in the rapidly gentrifying town of Proofrock, Idaho. The area has been stricken by a slew of evil forces, prompting Jade to become the unlikely hero — or as that role is referred to in the horror genre, the final girl.
“I miss her,” the Bram Stoker Award-winning author said of the character during a recent phone interview from his home in Boulder, Colorado. “I’ve been hanging out with her since about 2017 or 2018 and that’s a long time to hang out with a single character in a single world. I feel like I’ve watched her grow up and now I have to walk away from her. She’ll always be in my heart, but she won’t be in my pen anymore.”
Reflecting on his long journey with Jade, the author acknowledges that he’s put her to the test and that she’s become a fan-favorite character. He’s hoping readers won’t be too upset with him after reading “The Angel of Indian Lake.”
“It’s like I have a responsibility, obligation or duty to treat her right,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m a horror novelist and it’s a horror trilogy franchise, so I have to drag her across the cheese grater and throw her into the meat grinder. I have been mean to her and people care about her, so hopefully now they’re not mad at me for that.”
Jones even admitted that he almost killed Jade off at the end of “My Heart is a Chainsaw.”
“I did,” he said with a laugh. “Jade and some other people are dead on the floor and I thought that’s the way it was supposed to be, but my editor, Joe Monti at Saga, he convinced me that maybe I should be a little nicer. So to prove to him how wrong of an idea that was, I whipped up the new ending and turns out he was right. That’s when it became a trilogy. I had no plans for it to be more than a stand-alone horror novel.”
Throughout the series, Jade uses her deep knowledge of slasher films to determine how to defeat whatever entity she and the others may be up against. Each book is loaded with film references as Jones nods to classics like John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” Sean S. Cunningham’s “Friday the 13th” or Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” With “The Angel of Indian Lake,” he shouts out newer horror films too, and even hit horror television shows like “The Walking Dead.”
But it’s the Craven-directed and Kevin Williamson-written 1996 slasher revival film “Scream” that Jones taps into the most. He brings up the “Scream” franchise in the new book, citing the character Randy Meeks’ rules for surviving a trilogy, during a pivotal moment between Jade and fellow final girl Letha Mondragon, as they prepare to face yet another bloodbath. The rules include: The killer will be superhuman; anyone, including the main character, may die; and, finally, “the past will come back to bite you in the ass.”
Using that film to describe certain horror tropes makes throwing in all of the others a little easier because the “Scream” franchise doesn’t try to pretend that horror movies don’t exist in pop culture (unlike “The Walking Dead,” where not a single character has heard of George R. Romero’s zombie films).
“I’m so happy that ‘Scream’ opened the door for these characters,” Jones said. “It’s fun to plant those little things for the true believers, but I had to learn to modulate it. I couldn’t just write these words talking about slasher lore, I had to let it come up organically. I also couldn’t make too much of the stories hinge on an emotional awareness of that trivia because not everyone is going to key into it. Some people don’t like slasher movies and that’s fine, but for those who do, I wanted to pay back their investment and time they spent renting all of those movies and living with them.”
By the third act, you’d think Jade would just leave well enough alone in Proofrock and move on. But like any character that’s escaped the bloodshed in the first and/or second films, she keeps coming back.
There’s so many moments within this series where you just want to scream “Nooooo! Don’t go in there!” just like horror fans do in the movie theater.
“If anything, she wants to be like Neve Campbell in ‘Scream 3,’ where she’s just there for 20 minutes and then leaves,” Jones added with laugh.
As both a Blackfeet Native American and an avid consumer of horror himself, Jones said he relates a lot to Jade.
“I’m lucky in the first place that she chose slashers because had she had chosen tennis, I would have been lost,” he said. “Jade and I share a lot of the same fascinations and compulsions, and I feel like hanging out with her for all of these years has been eye-opening because I’m coming out of the trilogy a different writer than I was when I went into it. I learned something about sustaining an arc and character development over multiple installments and who knows when I’ll use that again? I don’t have any plans to write another trilogy anytime soon, but it’s good to know it’s something I can possibly pull off.”
Then he adds, “Who even knows if I’ve pulled it off? I won’t know until thousands of people have read this. But then, I’ll still always question it, like I could have done something better.”
Jones, who has written dozens of other books including “The Only Good Indians” and “Night of the Mannequins,” has several other projects in the works. He’s also the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, which he said has helped him come up with even more ideas for novels including the forthcoming “Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” which is about a Blackfeet Indian vampire, and “Last Stand at Saber Ridge,” following a pair of Native Americans who time travel.
His next book, “I Was a Teenage Slasher,” due out this summer, was directly inspired by a course he taught, so this may give readers an indication of what might be coming from Jones after that.
“In the fall, I’m teaching a possession narrative,” he says. “So that, to me, guarantees I’ll write a possession novel next.”