My review of "My Heart Is a Chainsaw" by Stephen Graham Jones on Goodreads

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an excellent book. I gave it four instead of five stars because I felt it was a bit too long, at four-hundred pages it felt longer than it needed.

Jade is a troubled teenager that knows everything there is to know about "slashers" horror films like Friday the 13th and Halloween. There's a killer in her little Idaho town and she immediatly realizes that she's in the middle of slasher herself, she must find the "final girl" to help her survive the imminent slaughter.

I like that the book is more than a good scary story. There's food for thought in there, commentary about social conditions of American's first people. There's also ton of slasher knowledge, you can tell the author is a slasher fan, you can totally see the Stephen King influences, specially the short story "The Raft" ...but I don't want to spoil it.

The neatest thing about the book was also the hardest for me to read. The author pulls off writing from the point of view of an slasher-obsessed teenage girl, at times her internal dialogue rambles away with forced metaphors or un-funny puns and it gets a little annoying, however it adds to the vibe of the book I suppose.

I picked up this book because I really enjoyed "The Only Good Indians" by the same author. That book gave me the heebie-jeebies for real. I was looking for a good scare. This book will give you that, but it's somehow "lighter" to read, not as horrific. If you are into that though, go ahead and read it, there's plenty of gore, blood and guts.

-JV

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Ten Years in Seattle

My wife and I fell in love with the PNW back in 2006. We went on a visit to Portland in the winter, it was literally the day I got my undergrad we went from the commencement ceremony straight to the airport, it was a nice trip. We ended up moving to Seattle in 2014 after 3 months of job-hunting, one failed interview at Amazon, a couple of false starts from Intel, finally a RFID company named Impinj gave me an offer and we haven't looked back. 

We wanted to raise our kids here, we liked that people here are educated and nicer, we love the mild weather, the mountains the tech scene. It's not perfect but we love it here. 

We lived in South Lake Union for the first five years. We wanted to know what it would be like to live in the middle of a city. Seattle in 2014 was growing fast, thanks to Amazon there were new building going up every week, and the atmosphere at the time felt exciting like Seattle was a boomtown. A new gold rush. 

Personally, we felt like this was an improvement. I was afraid that we weren't gong to like it, like it would be a big mistake. It was not. This is home now. 

We have made a life here. We bought a home in the Georgetown neighborhood 5 years ago and we want to stay. There are things about Seattle that annoy me, but I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I do miss good Latin food and the beach, but Florida is in the past. 

I didn't realize then how this tech migration would affect the city, how the infrastructure was not ready to grow with the population influx. Home prices are inflated, Public transportation sucks (still better than South Florida) and the job market is unpredictable. If I knew then what I now know. I'd still would have moved. The PNW vibe, the laid-back culture that gave us grunge music, Starbucks and Twilight is it for me. I can never say I am from Seattle because I have lived in too many places but I definitely call this our home.