Jade Daniels Is My Final Girl: The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones

 The third movie of any horror trilogy is often where we see our Final Girl begin to lose her shine. She’s tasted blood and tears. They’ve killed or harmed others to survive (on occasion). Nearly everyone around her begins to suspect that SHE is the cause of all the woes around her - that she is the real problem, not whatever supernatural or human killer comes around. She is, as they say, BAD NEWS.  The final girl begins to feel the isolation, might even feel cursed. She is the town pariah, even as she fights to keep the people who have turned against her safe. 

Enter Jade Daniels. 

Through the cursed and stolen lands, across the tight rope edge of a high dam, you have made your way here to my cozy little corner of the internet. Pull up a chair and I’ll pour you some tea. Have a cookie. You’ll need your strength as we dive into The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones, the final book of The Indian Lake trilogy.

Reapers and chainsaws and claws, oh my!

I know I mentioned this in my Booktok that I did a second read of this book before writing a review. I wanted to do this story justice. This is one of the best horror series I have read since I read The Dark Tower. 

The Angel of Indian Lake starts like a panic attack and ends in a primal scream. Jade is back in Proofrock after four years of time served. Letha (who has survived the previous two novels with her own scars) has gotten Jade a job teaching her favorite class - history. Letha threw the weight of her inheritance behind the appointment, effectively bullying the school board into giving Jade a chance. Taking up the mantle of Mr. Holmes makes the most sense - he represents one of the few people who actually cared about Jade when everyone else had given up. Jade isn’t without her qualifications to teach. While serving time for the only crime they could pin on her (the destruction of government property), she got a degree that allows her to teach. 

The novel starts with Jade trying hard to be the adult. She’s fighting her own anxiety while she heads towards her classroom. This feeling is almost prescient in its nature, and as Jade quickly learns, there are already people who have gone missing: two teenagers who had been working on a project for her class and one of their younger siblings. Jade doesn’t know until Banner, Lethe’s husband and Proofrock Sheriff, comes to check on her after the disappearances. Well, to check on her or to pull her back into investigating disappearing teenagers. 

This seems entirely unfair. Jade is traumatized by her past experiences, by her deep understanding of true horror that has kept rising from the lake and the land. There’s no other way to describe the underlying anxiety Jade feels and the way she isolates herself even further by returning to her childhood home to live (even though the place is trashed). She knows that no one really wants her back in town, but she is their token Native American, their weathervane for horror, even as they blame her for it all having happened.

Still, despite this, Jade persists. She reminds me quite a bit of Jamie Lee Curtis in the Halloween franchise, as she slowly progressed into a paranoid, broken mess that trusts little and sees the killer in every shadow. Laurie Strode was lucky - she only really has to deal with Michael. 

Jade has so much more, 

Jade’s legacy to the town isn’t her trauma. It’s her ability to stand in the face of horrors, to turn against the tide to fight the evil to save the people and the town she cares about. She isn’t in this for the fame - in fact, she just wants to hide from the infamy she has garnered in Proofrock and beyond. 

I can’t sing the praises of this final installment enough. Stephen Graham Jones takes us on this beautiful ride through a horror trilogy that both understands and bucks the horror movie rules. Jade and Letha’s send off leaves us not wanting more. It’s time for Jade to rest and heal. 

She deserves it. 

Thank you for joining me on this bloody adventure through the various massacres around Proofrock.

Now, as we fly over Indian Lake (from the viewpoint of a small, purring plane), over the dam, and back into the stars, know that I shall be here with another book suggestion, should you need it.