Books like “My Heart Is a Chainsaw”

What to read after “My Heart Is a Chainsaw” by Stephen Graham Jones: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
Clown in a Cornfield
Adam Cesare · 2020
Same genre: “Horror fiction” and “Slasher fiction”
After her mother's death, Quinn moves with her father to Kettle Springs, a Missouri town split between resentful adults and bored teenagers. At the Founder's Day party in a cornfield, the town mascot, Frendo the Clown, begins killing students, and Quinn has to work out who can be trusted.
2
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens · 2018
Similar setting: “Small Town Secrets”
Abandoned by her family as a child, Kya grows up alone in a North Carolina marsh, shunned by the nearby town as the Marsh Girl. She teaches herself to survive on the land and inches toward love, until a local man is found dead and she becomes the chief suspect.
3
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
Grady Hendrix · 2020
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Small Town Secrets
- Survival
Patricia, a suburban housewife in 1990s Charleston, joins a true-crime book club that becomes the only excitement in her week. When a new neighbour is suspected of preying on local children, the women try to convince a town that would rather not listen, and then take matters into their own hands.
4
The Final Girl Support Group
Grady Hendrix · 2021
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Final Girl
- Survival
Six women who each survived a famous mass murder meet in a therapist's group to cope with the aftermath. When one of them is killed, the group's most guarded member goes on the run to learn who is hunting them and why their old cases keep being reopened.
5
The Reformatory
Tananarive Due · 2023
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robert is sent to a brutal reform school after a scuffle with a white teenager. He can see ghosts, including the boys who died there, and the warden wants to use that ability. Outside, his sister works with a lawyer to bring him home.
6
The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett · 2020
Similar setting: “Small Town Secrets”
- Small Town Secrets
- Coming of Age
Twin sisters from a small Southern town where everyone is light-skinned choose opposite lives: one returns to raise a Black daughter, the other passes as white and hides her past. Across the decades, their daughters' paths unexpectedly cross.
7
Hex
Thomas Olde Heuvelt · 2013
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Small Town Secrets
In the town of Black Spring, a seventeenth-century witch walks the streets with her eyes and mouth sewn shut. The elders hide the curse from outsiders, but bored teenagers who want to broadcast her presence set off events that no one can undo.
8
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Holly Jackson · 2019
Similar setting: “Small Town Secrets”
- Small Town Secrets
- Coming of Age
For a school project, Pip reopens the closed case of Andie Bell, a local girl murdered five years ago, and her boyfriend Sal, who confessed and then died. As she records interviews with the people involved, the tidy story everyone accepted begins to come apart.
9
The House Next Door
Anne Rivers Siddons · 1978
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Small Town Secrets
A new house is built beside the Kennedys in their quiet Atlanta neighbourhood. Over two years the families who move in are destroyed by scandal and violence, and even visitors are touched. Colquitt begins to believe the house itself is malevolent, and decides to warn the world.
10
The Outsiders
S.E. Hinton · 1967
Same genre: “Coming-of-age fiction”
- Outcast Hero
- Coming of Age
Ponyboy Curtis is a greaser in a city divided between poor kids and the richer Socs. After a fight turns deadly, he and his friend go into hiding, and he begins to see the people around him beyond their labels.
11
Ghost Story
Peter Straub · 1979
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Small Town Secrets
Four elderly friends in a small New York town have spent a lifetime telling each other ghost stories at their club. Now something from a winter forty years earlier, a death they all helped to hide, has returned to collect the debt.
12
Final Girls
Riley Sager · 2017
Similar plot moves: “Final Girl” and “Survival”
- Final Girl
- Survival
Ten years after surviving a massacre at a remote cabin in the woods, Quincy has built a quiet life out of pills, baking and careful routine. When another survivor from that group of women dies and a third turns up at her door, the past she cannot fully remember starts to close in again.