The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

The Only Good Indians
by Stephen Graham Jones
Saga Press, 2020

Stephen Graham Jones has quietly amassed a following over the course of his twenty-year career writing fiction. Prolificacy has been a key element to his success, contributing over twenty stories of varying length to the world of genre fiction. His stories are often as bizarre as his own career origin story, having fabricated a novel upon meeting former Houghton-Mifflin editor Janet Silver at a writer’s conference. Earning her interest in his story, he set to work on what would become his first novel, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (Fiction Collective 2, 2000).

2020 should be considered a breakout year for Jones, given his inclusion in Saga Press’ vast and diverse catalog with The Only Good Indians, a fantastical revenge horror story set a decade after four men commit an illegal hunting expedition, slaughtering a group of elk on off limits land, and shooting more than they need. Since that night, the four proud huntsmen have grown up and gone their separate ways, forever tied together in their decision to rebel against tradition and their tribe, Blackfeet Nation.

Jones is a fan of the slasher film horror subgenre, and it shows here. He structures the novel as such, following the four friends – Ricky, Lewis, Gabe, and Cass, as they succumb mentally and sometimes literally to the vengeful spirit of one of the fallen elk who, to make matters more complicated and dangerous, has the ability to shift itself into human bodies.

Each of the four main cast gets his own section of the story as the focus, in varying degrees, before it’s on to the next victim - a classic slasher standby. An interesting, often unsettling tactic Jones sprinkles into the narrative is the use of point of view from the elk. Getting a story from the killer’s point of view is not in itself unique, but Jones proves his ability to creep his readers out, with sudden, seemingly out of nowhere second person narrative. Two characters will be conversing and one of them will notice a sudden movement in the distance before Jones quickly jumps to the elk-spirit’s demented thoughts – indeed, the elk is always around, watching its quarry.

The strongest parts of this story shine throughout the middle act, with surviving characters realizing something is not quite right around the Blackfeet Reservation, that something is out there with a bloody agenda, and the paranoia surrounding them all. The elk-spirit is not one to simply ambush; it's intricate in its revenge plot, often setting up its enemies to do damage to themselves, emotionally and physically.

The novel’s final act mostly consists of a classic slasher horror movie trope with an elongated chase scene, but is nonetheless thrilling, with the monster stalking its human prey, moving from set piece to set piece. In one chilling (for said character, at least) scene, a feeling of claustrophobia is added:

Immediately she regrets closing herself in like this, and panics hard, digging with her hands, kicking with her legs until she surges ahead into… a dry cave under this boxcar. A magic kind of place. So quiet but not quite dark: the sunlight’s seeped in through the thousand-million crystals of snow packed all around her, making the walls glow blue like ice.

Not a cave, she tells herself, though. A tomb. A grave.

She gathers her will and pushes into the far blue wall, takes a deep breath to push through, but then each sidearm of snow she sweeps away, ready to break into open air, there’s just more snow, and more snow. She gasps her lungs empty, tries to suck a breath in but there’s only snow everywhere, in her mouth. She gags, bucks, gets her feet under her as best she can and just pushes. Into more snow.

The Only Good Indians is perhaps Jones’ most personal novel, for he is an elk hunter himself and is stringent about not being wasteful regarding the lives he takes. The novel’s title also holds some historical weight – it is in response to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1886 declaration “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Jones’ prose almost screams that this novel is an exercise in exorcism of the sin of wasting a kill, and what it truly means to be a “good Indian.” As with any slasher story, The Only Good Indians feels like a fantasy for those who desire swift justice with a violent bent; wrongdoers are punished without learning much, but the audience hears the message, loud and clear.

—Michael Feeney is a book reviewer and pop culture junkie from the Philadelphia area. He is an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction.