Podcasts
Stephen Graham Jones on How Stephen King’s ‘Skeleton Crew’ Helped Inspire ‘My Heart is a Chainsaw’ [The Losers’ Club Podcast]
![Stephen Graham Jones on How Stephen King's 'Skeleton Crew' Helped Inspire 'My Heart is a Chainsaw' [The Losers' Club Podcast]](https://bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/sgj-lc.jpg)
Do you like scary movies? Of course you do, you’re reading Bloody Disgusting.
Jade Daniels, the teenage protagonist of Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw, likes scary movies, too. Slashers, specifically. She likes them so much that when it appears a real slasher has descended upon her small Idaho town, her reaction isn’t one of horror, but of excitement. As the community’s slasher sage, it’s on her to identify the patterns, the suspects, and, of course, the final girl.
It sounds cute, that premise, but Jones’ excellent book is anything but. Jade’s horror fandom isn’t quirky, it’s all-consuming. Her desire to impose the tenets of slashers on her community’s situation isn’t appealing, it’s alienating. My Heart is a Chainsaw, the first in a trilogy, has plenty of humor and horror, but it’s really a portrait of a girl whose lot in life has driven her away from reality and into the celluloid arms of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. That said, it’s also a riot, its twists and turns punctuated with eccentric and thoughtful analysis of one of horror’s most disreputable genres.
In the latest installment of The Losers’ Club’s On Writers series, co-hosts Randall Colburn and Mel Kassel talk to Jones about the book’s long road to publication, “likable” characters in fiction, and his own evolving relationship to the slashers of yore. This being a Stephen King podcast, Jones discusses his favorite King books and the Skeleton Crew story that helped inspire My Heart is a Chainsaw. He also teases what’s to come in the trilogy’s next two volumes.
Stream the conversation below and return next week when the Losers return to The Shop to review Keith Thomas’ fiery new reimagining of King’s Firestarter starring Zak Efron. For further adventures, join the Losers’ Club over long days and pleasant nights via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RadioPublic, Acast, Google Podcasts, and RSS.
You can also unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive content in The Barrens (Patreon).
Maybe you haven’t thought about your good friend Sweeney Todd in a while, or maybe you have. The 2007 movie is a bit of a memory, though a fond one – it has a healthy 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, for what it’s worth. But 2023’s Broadway revival starring Josh Groban, who your mom thinks is “so talented” (she’s right!), was enough of a hit that its run was extended.
It appears we’re in a bit of a Sweeneyssaince.
For the uninitiated, Sweeney Todd is the story of a barber who kills his customers and disposes of the bodies by passing them off to pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett, who uses them as a special ingredient. But there’s more below the trap door.
Sweeney Todd isn’t just a late 70s musical that turned into a movie; it started as a penny dreadful called The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance (author unknown), told week-to-week in the 1840s. Penny dreadfuls were essentially fiction zines featuring serialized stories that were usually horror-based and cost a penny, leading to the very literal nickname.
The String of Pearls differs from the more well-known Sweeney Todd plot in that it follows the investigation of a missing persons case that leads to the reveal of Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett’s arrangement, as opposed to the more modern iteration which treats audiences to the duo hatching their homicidal plan and then giving the worst haircuts ever. What a delightfully wild reveal that must have been if you were a reader in Victorian London after weeks of wondering what had become of the missing sailor carrying a string of pearls to deliver to a lovely girl.
Kristen and Will discuss the history and future of Sweeney Todd and works inspired by it this week on Guide to the Unknown. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to get a new episode every Friday.
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