This sequel picks up the story shortly after My Heart is a Chainsaw. Jade, now Jennifer, returns to Proofrock years later and changed from her experience. This of course happens to be the same day that Dark Mill South, you guessed it--a serial killer, escapes custody during transport and yet another horror is unleashed upon the town.

Blood flies and bodies pile up rather quickly in this one. SGJ wastes no time in getting to the gore. Much like My Heart is a Chainsaw, this book is inspired by and pays homage to every slasher flick you could imagine. Any fan of the the gere will love the little tid-bits nods entwined through the story.

Its a great second book for a series, leads us along but leaves more story to tell. While the pacing gets bogged down at some points throughout, SGJ's style and stellar writing pull you through this blood-soaked novel. If you enjoyed My Heart is a Chainsaw, you'll dig this. And now i cant wait to read the next.

Lets be judgy for a second....

I am totally swooning over not just this cover but the title too!!!

Is this not what nightmares are made of?

I read and OBSESSED over My Heart Is a Chainsaw, last year. I could not tell enough people about this book! Strangers in Shop-Rite? You betcha! This book plagued my soul and haunted me for months after concluding. I had loved every last bit of it.

Soooooo....

When I heard there would be a sequel, "Don't Fear the Reaper" being released, I prepared myself to beg, borrow or steal to get my hands on an early copy.

Gosh, do I love netgalley! Thank you for granting my bookish wish !!!

Don't Fear the Reaper, as you guessed, is literally what nightmares are made of. I highly suggest you read this book during the day with proper sunlight, after a well rested night....

You will not be sleeping for days after concluding..

That was your fair warning. Now, back to the book... Jones made a name for himself with this one. move over Stephen King, we have a new horror author to obsess over!

Page one, I was completely consumed and thrown right into the wolves. There was no "let up" or chance to breathe between pages. I believe I held my breath for 99.9% of this book. The suspense was there early on. I was thrown from one twist to the next and in no way, shape or form, was I able to figure out who the killer was before it was revealed.

As always, Stephen Graham Jones, delivered.

I can not wait for another banger! (Please don't make me wait too long!!!)

Five Stars

Teaser:

December 12th, 2019, Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author, Stephen Graham Jones.

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday.

Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.

The synopsis made me nervous. "Jade gets out of jail and there's a new serial killer in town" sounded a little goofy, but I quickly remembered why I enjoy his writing to begin with, and then I was on board for whatever Graham had to offer. The kill count is higher. It's very scary. I loved this opening as well, with some insight into how teens are responding to the collective town grief (urban legends! Hookup games!) The more time I spend in this town, the more I love it.

The second of the Lake Witch Trilogy did not disappoint. Loaded with classic horror movie references Don’t Fear the Reaper continues with Jade returning to Proofrock. As luck would have it convicted serial killer Dark Mill South escapes his convoy and finds himself there. This story is nonstop action that has multiple villains and is a bunch of fun. The cast of over the top characters, slasher scenes and pulse pounding action make this series a great read for horror movie fans.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
4 ⭐️

I’m usually very bad at keeping up with an on-going series but it was no pressure or a task for me to keep up with the Indian Lake Trilogy. I love SGJ, I love slasher films and I love horror!! Don’t fear the reaper (DFTR) is just an incredible follow-up to the first book and I’m glad that this didn’t fall into the second book syndrome category!

A handful of year after overturning Jade’s conviction, she is back to Proofrock. Her life is changed but she’s still reeling from the effects of the previous massacres. A blizzard hits, town goes under a power outage and awfully coincides with the prison escape of the notorious convicted serial killer Dark Mill South! DMS is back to get his revenge. I know what you are thinking, yes it sounds similar to Halloween, but ITS DIFFERENT, okay?! DFTR is more slashing and has more character depth than the Halloween movie franchise. There is a fine line between serial killers and slashers and you’ll know that when you read these books.

SGJ is a brilliant writer, so I don’t think I have to emphasise that! I’m now patiently waiting for the final book to drop. Now I know why people love reading series, the excitement and expectations are exhilarating.

Thank you Saga Press via Netgalley for the ebook!

It is rare that you find a sequel that truly holds up to the original. Things tend to get muddy and drug out and then you lose interest half way through. That is simply not the case with Don’t Fear The Reaper. I devoured this book in one sitting. I found myself holding my breath and fully engulfed in the world this book puts you in. This is a true tribute to the slasher genre. Wes Craven would’ve loved it!

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for providing an advance copy in exchange for feedback. An excellent sequel. It does a great job of living up to the first book while taking seriously the trauma the characters have all been through.

Thank you to netgalley for providing an e-galley for review. The next installment of the Jade Daniels saga did not quite live up to the first one. While the Jennifer/Jade scenes were the most interesting part of the book overall, the tangents pulled away from the story and felt forced.

Don't Fear the Reaper starts four years after the Independence Day killings featured in My Heart is a Chainsaw. Jennifer "Jade" Daniels has served her time and is now out on parole and back in Proofrock after her conviction is overturned. Of course with the luck Jennifer Daniel has, she happens to return to Proofrock in time for Christmas and just around the same time as Dark Mill South, a convicted serial killer escapes.

Leave it to Dark Mill South to begin his 'reunion' tour on December 12, 2019 and by December 13th the body count has gone up all over again.

While Jennifer is determined to not return to the past and declares in her mind that she is not a final girl, all signs point otherwise as Jennifer is forced to delve back into the buried knowledge she keeps on slasher flicks. Of course this time she isn't as alone as Letha Mondragon has taken on and carried the knowledge with her of slasher flicks.

Sure Don't Fear the Reaper could be taken on as a stand alone but to truly appreciate all the characters have gone through and survived you need to read My Heart is a Chainsaw. If not for the sake of understanding then maybe for the sake of appreciating the expansive nods towards so many Slasher flicks.

With the Lake Witch trilogy you would think characters couldn't grow anymore than they already have but oh they have grown so much. Witnessing Jade return to being Jennifer Daniels and then going back to being Jade is just something made for the screen, and of course we cannot help but forget about the Slasher in Reaper, Dark Mill South.

Dark Mill South has a justification and purpose for his kill count, and in true Slasher fashion, Dark Mill South possesses an almost god like, immortal presence in the pages. In the end I was holding my breath and waiting for that striking jump scare revelation. Did it happen? Well I guess you will have to find out!

With all that was packed to the brim in Don't Fear the Reaper and with the unique style of Jones' writing that leaves me wanting more, of course I am eager to see how the Lake Witch Trilogy ends. Until next time, happy reading!

If there’s one thing horror author Stephen Graham Jones knows, it’s slasher films. Some of his most famous novels, like The Only Good Indians and The Last Final Girl, play in that subgenre. He even has a column in Fangoria examining the slasher’s significance and resurgence in film history.

So it’s no surprise, then, that Jones is right at home carving up and subverting slasher films in his planned trilogy of Indian Lake novels. The first, My Heart Is A Chainsaw, was published in 2021. The second, Don’t Fear the Reaper, came out earlier this month.

Reaper picks up four years after the bloody concluding events of Chainsaw, where teenage Native American Final Girl Jade Daniels stopped the Lake Witch killer in her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, but not before a Fourth of July massacre resulted in several deaths, the severe injury of Jade’s friend Letha Mondragon, and a prison sentence for Jade for stabbing and killing her abusive father.

Now, Jade is returning home to start anew after the courts overturn her conviction. She goes by her birth name Jennifer now. She’s given up her almost obsessive fascination with slasher flicks and passed that fascination on to Letha after training her to be the Final Girl in ‘Chainsaw’.

But, on the heels of a hundred-year Christmas storm, a new killer comes out of the shadows to wreak havoc on Proofrock. Convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South is big, he’s bad, he has a hook for a hand, and he’s on a mission to avenge the deaths of 38 Dakota men who President Lincoln ordered to hang in 1862. And this time, he’s seen all the same slasher movies Jade has. As the body count starts to rack up, Jade has to embrace her encyclopedic horror movie knowledge and again believe that she has what it takes to be the Final Girl.

“Most horror stories, especially slashers, it’s about the rise of the underdog,” Jones said in a 2021 interview with Fangoria promoting Chainsaw. “It’s me versus Cthulhu or me versus Jason Voorhees, and both of those can take me out without even breaking a sweat, so I should not be able to survive this, yet against all odds, against a whole world trying to smush me down, if I push through hard enough, I can make it to daylight. And I think that’s a wonderful model for us to all follow.”

In crafting this sequel, Jones follows that model and also takes the words of Scream’s movie geek Randy Meeks to heart: The body count is always bigger. The death scenes are always much more elaborate. Carnage candy. And never, ever, under any circumstances, assume the killer is dead. He gleefully mixes and matches references to the classic slashers and new ones alike; he continues Chainsaw’s tradition of naming chapters after films like Scream or Happy Death Day or It Follows. Jones also employs names as verbs, making characters “Kane Hodder” their way over to one another or “Shining”s their way through a snowdrift.

He even dedicates Reaper to the late Wes Craven, director of the Scream franchise. Appropriately, he dedicated Chainsaw to producer Debra Hill, the unsung hero of the Halloween films.

If all that sounds like too much of an inside baseball reference fest, rest assured those references are organic to the story, and Jade’s story comes first. Reaper, like Chainsaw before it, is like reading a jump scare in book form. But it’s also empathetic and soulful and gives voice to the characters that often have no agency in these types of stories. Jade loves horror films because they helped her deal with the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, but Jones never dwells on that and instead focuses on all the ways Jade takes those experiences and love of the genre and uses them to save the people she loves. There’s a lot of trauma in these books, but they’re not trauma porn. This is simply a straightforward slasher that knows how to meditate on loss — loss of family, loss of innocence, loss of a town, loss of a culture.

What’s more, Jones goes to great lengths to impart to the reader that the monsters in Reaper are real, because what’s real is often scarier than anything we can imagine. “Elevated horror,” this ain’t.

Reaper is both a loving homage to slashers and a middle finger to conventional horror tropes. Jade is the buzzing chainsaw heart of this series, a story told from the point of view of someone who is Final Girl-adjacent and must believe in herself enough to become the Final Girl.

I can’t wait to see how her story concludes.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books as well as Stephen Graham Jones for this ARC. It was amazing.
#NetGalley #StephenGrahamJones #GalleryBooks #Don'tFeartheReaper #LakeWitch#2
Well Mr. Jones, you never cease to amaze, entertain, and horrify, in the best way, I didn't think he could beat the first book. How often does a sequel outshine the OG anyway? Well, this one did. My slasher loving soul has been singing since I finished this one. We reconnect with Jade as she gets out of prison. She returns to Poofrock and, well, you know...
This one took off and rarely let up. The slasher references I loved from "My Heart is a Chainsaw" were still all over the place and there was plenty of visceral and delicious gore. I enjoyed the broader persepctive that we were got this time around. While the first book was from Jade's POV, this one included a lot more interactions from other characters. The returning characters have changed and evolved since we last saw them. I enjoyed Letha more this time around than in the first book. She and Jade, now Jennifer, team up to handle Dark Mill South, a convicted serial killer escapee from a prison transport bus. Now there's blood everywhere and we need a broom to sweep up some of these horror references. Not that I'm complaining...
Stephen Graham Jones' writing style isn't for everyone. His books require concentration. They're fast-paced and very stylized. There is a lot of detail that may make some readers think that this book is longer than it needs to be. I'm not one of them, but I do get it. I do, however, have to set aside some solid reading time in which I can be as distraction free as possible when I'm reading an SGJ. This book, as the others, are not for the casual reader nor the wishy-washy horror fan. Keep up the gore, Mr. Jones!

This is both the middle book in a trilogy and a slasher novel, combining two things I don't usually like; series and horror. Which is to say, I liked the first book in this trilogy well enough to jump right into the second book. And *spoiler alert* I'm planning to read the third book when it is published. Because it is the second book in a horror trilogy, spoilers are unavoidable for the first book. Just letting you know.

A handful of years after the massacre, Jade returns to Proofrock along with an enormous snowstorm which has everyone hunkering down at home. She reunites with her friend Letha, still recovering from her injuries but also married and mother to a toddler. At the same time, a transport moving a serial killer disappears in that same storm. Is it a surprise when the serial killer, a man as well-versed in slasher lore as Jade, shows up in Proofrock?

What makes this book interesting are Jade and Letha and their relationship and knowledge that it's up to them, once again, to stop what's happening. They believe themselves too old to be the target of the killer, but they are certainly willing to take him out, at considerable risk to themselves. Jones manages to make the secondary characters interesting as he gives attention to both characters from the previous books, and a few new ones. Especially well done is the chapter about Jade's mother's life. This is a horror novel that absolutely respects the genre, but it's also a novel about people living in an isolated town in the Wyoming mountains.

I had such high hopes for Don’t Fear the Reaper and really wanted to love it. Instead, I found that it was too slow for my liking. It wasn’t until the 40% mark that I finally began to get into the story. It took just as long for me to wrap my head around what was going on in the story. It was somewhat hard to follow as too many things were happening at once. That said, Reaper may very well be better than My Heart Is A Chainsaw, and although I did not love it, I did enjoy it. As with Chainsaw, there were some incredibly unpredictable and unexpected plot twists. In the end, I was shocked once all was unveiled. It was also cool to see what happened after Chainsaw ended and what became of Jennifer and the other characters. It was worth reading it and catching up with the Proofrock happenings.

Voluntarily reviewed after receiving a free copy courtesy of NetGalley, the Publisher, and the author, Stephen Graham Jones.

Following the overturning of Jade’s conviction from My Heart is a Chainsaw, Jade returns home to Proofrock at the same time serial killer Dark Mill South happens upon the town during a blizzard.
I’m DMS’s own words he’s a revenge slasher: he’s out to even the score for 38 Dakota men hanged in 1862.
This sequel is bloodier. It’s angrier. It’s lusting for lives. I loved every sentence of this. And even better, unlike the slow burn of MHIAC, the action starts immediately in this one.
I listened to audio for the first book and the narration was perfection but I do think reading this versus listening helped me a little since there are so many characters. On that note: those chapters get a voice in this one. Where the first book was just Jade, this time we get Jade, her mom, Galatea Pangborn, the new history teacher, and more.
There are a ton of points of view but it made the book so much better because as with any good slasher, it’s never just one twist.
Absolutely fantastic horror, as per usual for Mr Jones.

Thankyou for the read now option .

This was fantastic. It takes sequel of slashers and turns it sideways, upside-down, backwards in a good way.

I loved everything about it. Jade is my favorite final girl.

I have a rule when it comes to slashers.. With occasional rare exceptions, slasher movies should not exceed 90 minutes and slasher novels should not exceed 350 pages. This latest novel from Stephen Graham Jones, is Book 2 in a trilogy that started with the exceptional My Heart is a Chainsaw (just over 400 well-crafted pages). This sequel is a bloated 464 pages, and there's no need for 100 of them.

The mistake Jones makes here is trying too hard to turn this sequel into a standalone novel. It doesn't work, especially for those of us who loved the first book and would have been cool with it being a one-and-done display of how to write a slasher novel that isn't boring or predictable. Despite the fun film references, and the returning lead and villain — along the promotion of two minor characters —I was ready for this installment to end after 300 or so pages.

So, will I read the concluding third book when it's released? Of course, but only because the author's track record for delivering the goods is that occasional rare exception. And no one ever loves the middle book in a trilogy anyway.

By far one of the easiest ratings I could ever give. I don't think I could stumble upon a Stephen Graham Jones book that I don't like. I loved how this story played out and that we still got the essay kind of format with the weirdly obsessed topics. My Heart Is A Chainsaw will always be a classic in its own right, but I appreciate that this is a trilogy and I get more story.
Loved everything about it, and will be shouting from the roof tops for the foreseable future. Also the audiobook has a large cast and it was very well done.
Thank you to Saga Press and Netgalley for an e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

Okay so I spent a lot of time reading into the wee hours of the night on this one. I loved my heart is a chainsaw and when I saw the sequel was coming out I nearly fainted with anticipation. And Stephen did not disappoint. We pick up 4 years after the events in my heart is a chainsaw following are final girls of final girls miss jade. The action in this book picks up right away which is why I lost hours of sleep reading this one twist on twist on twist, I loved it ! The paste in this book is way faster than my heart is a chainsaw which I loved. I will say I could have done with shorter chapters some chapters as long as 80 pages some of us need sleep Stephen lol. This definitely is a love letter to all your favorite slasher films. I’ve found a new thriller/horror author and I can’t wait to see what els he comes out with 🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤 also I want to note that you totally could read this as a stand alone but to really submerse yourself in the story I would recommend you start with the first one.

Don’t Fear The Reaper picks up four years after the end of My Heart is a Chainsaw. Jade Daniels’ case has been overturned and she’s been released from prison, returning to Proofrock right before Christmas. Meanwhile, Dark Mill South has escaped during his prison transfer. The nightmare isn’t over.

I didn’t realize when I first read Chainsaw that this was going to be a trilogy, but I can’t say I’m upset about that. I love Stephen Graham Jones’ writing and will read basically anything he writes. Book two in this trilogy revisits familiar characters and digs deep into the horror of the aftermath of mass trauma. Some people deal with it in healthy ways and other flounder under its weight. Though she’s left her slasher-obsessed days behind, Jade knows the rules, and she’ll have to use them to prevent more deaths and hopefully not end up the final girl, again.

Definitely recommend if you enjoyed the first one, or reading both back to back if you want to get into this cool horror trilogy in the making. It’s out now wherever you get your books.

Don’t Fear The Reaper
By Stephen Graham Jones


Jennifer “Jade” Daniels the reluctant final girl from My Heart Is A Chainsaw, is back. In this sequel, Jade, no scratch that, Jennifer returns to Proofrock and is ready to leave the Independence Day Massacre behind her. It’s four years later and she is starring in her own Comeback Special. Unfortunately, she has chosen to return the same day Dark Mills South has escaped during transport under the haze of a blizzard white out and he’s headed for Witch Lake.

I’d hate to spoil things for you, so I won’t say too much. But I will tell you some of what you can expect from the second installment of the Indian Lake Trilogy:

🔪 It’s dedication to Wes Craven
🪓 Takes place in a span of 36 hours
💉 Is it a slasher or a serial killer thing?
🪛 Encyclopedic knowledge of slasher films
🪚 High body count
🔫 It takes a community
🏹 You will cheer on your favorite final girl


Are you looking for a book to curl up with on a cold winter night? Leave the lights on and pickup Don’t Fear the Reaper. If you are a fan of Stephen Graham Jones, and you were hooked by My Heart Is A Chainsaw, you won’t want to miss the sequel.


My thanks to Stephen Graham Jones, @NetGalley and @GalleryBooks and @SagaSFF for the opportunity to read this advance digital copy.

Now available! Pub Date: 07 Feb 2023