My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Content Warning: This section includes discussion of childhood sexual abuse.

Jennifer “Jade” Daniels is the protagonist of My Heart Is a Chainsaw. She is a 17-year-old girl from Proofrock, Idaho who is related to the Blackfoot tribe on her father’s side. She lives with her father, Tab Daniels, and only sees her mother, Kimmy, when she steals hair dye from the dollar store. Jade typically dresses in her work coveralls from her job as a school janitor. She occasionally wears clothes and jewelry with references to films or goth/metal music. She wears combat boots, paints her nails black, and frequently dyes her hair unnatural colors. Jade loves horror, owning many slasher films on VHS tape and memorizing information about the genre. In high school, she often plays horror-themed pranks on her classmates such as pretending to cut off her own finger or making a scary mask out of edible underwear. She feels like an outcast in her community, claiming “I’m nobody, I’m the town reject, the weird girl, the walking suicide, the Indian who shouldn’t even be alive” (175). Her taste in movies and clothes, her history of mental health conditions, and her cultural identity cause Jade to feel excluded by other people in Proofrock, and Jade often seeks to be deliberatively provocative rather than trying to fit in and behave more normally.