The Only Good Indians (2020), Stephen Graham Jones’s latest novel, often feels weighed down by a distant, but strong, tradition. For horror fans, there is a lot to like in its pages: haunted houses, breaching of cultural taboos, spectacular but rarely overdone gore, hybrid monsters, and an ever-present deniability of the supernatural. Many reviewers celebrate Jones’ style, citing his creation of likeable and realistically flawed characters as the novel’s main strength, with its horror coming in a close second. While these elements are certainly strong in The Only Good Indians, I found that the change in the novel’s structure after the first section to be the real strength of the novel. Presenting readers with a horror novel turned into hopeful allegory, Jones creates characters that battle with or ignore their indigenous traditions and identities only to have them caught, destroyed, and changed by those same traditions. By its conclusion, The Only Good Indians becomes less a tale of horror, grief, and trauma, and more one focused on acceptance and reconciliation of one’s sense of identity.
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The story is at its core a supernatural revenge plot. Four friends, unlucky in their hunts before Thanksgiving, find themselves overlooking a herd of elk on their elders’ hunting ground on a Blackfoot reservation. Despite its being forbidden for the friends to hunt there, the four men open fire on the herd, killing many of the elk. Lewis, one of the novel’s central characters, strikes a cow elk who, unbeknownst to the hunters, is carrying a calf. Refusing to die, the cow elk struggles against Lewis’ bullets to protect the unborn calf. Failing to do so, the cow elk succumbs, retreats into the memory of the herd only to be reborn into the world as a hellish elk-woman hell-bent on taking from the surviving hunters exactly what they stole from her: life.
For those readers interested in environmental politics, the elk-woman is surely the character to train your focus on. With her murder observed by the wide-eyed herd, the elk-woman’s death is taken into the collective memory of the elk, highlighting the power of trauma and the inheritance of pain to live on beyond the death of an individual. Pair this image with the ever-present ghostly herd that seems to creep in from the sides of the page, and you have a book that builds terror out of an animal often viewed only as prey. The elk-woman’s early development in the first half of the novel is, at least to me, the strongest source of terror. She lurks in the shadows, only seen through half-glances and tricks of the light. As readers we are concerned with the origins of the creature; is she/it a figment of Lewis’ imagination, a mythical ghost from a culture distant from our own? Or is she truly a new cryptid from the hills? These early moments of glowing yellow eyes, quick shadows and glimpses of the elk-woman are all great examples of pure horror writing.
The Only Good Indians does incredibly well in the first half of the novel and really hammers home popular notions of horror. Making my way through Lewis’s narrative was at times some of the most nail-biting bits of reading I’ve done in the past year, forcing me at times to breathe, set the book down, and get up for a walk. The first half was brutal; I watched Lewis suffer and regularly relished in the familiar moments of horror from claustrophobic homes to garages made quickly into improvised slaughterhouses. By all accounts, Lewis is a haunted character; slowly succumbing to his guilt and his life away from his friends back home, and the horror in this section truly amplifies the out-of-placeness he experiences. I should recognize that many readers have commented that they stopped reading shortly after Lewis’ narrative to take a break. It should be no surprise that this is also where Jones admits to setting the project down. The break explains the shift in the novel’s structure.
I think the rest of Good Indians is seriously horrific and bloody, but it lacks some of the tension of the first half centered on Lewis. Arguing that one half is better than the other, though, is like trying to compare a gothic nightmare with a well-done monster movie. I would say that we see the novel shift from horror and move toward allegory in its second half. The monster represents part of this shift by becoming more concrete and less of a mystery. By this point in the story, the myth of the elk-woman solidifies, with her narration appearing in the text, and the characters she hunts in the second half of the novel seem predestined to fall prey to her. It was not a question of whether these characters were going to make it, but how they were going to die that drove my eyes across the page. Jones exchanges the slow burn of the first half of the novel for a quick bloody night and a one-on-one showdown in one of the best sports-related scenes I’ve read: a battle between the past and the hope of the future.
And this shift is where I think Stephen Graham Jones shines. We move from horror—a genre we all know well here—into the overtly allegorical. It would be good to remember that horror is cathartic, and often fear is easy to cultivate, but to care about a cultural tradition takes time—like a long slog through deep snow. Sure, the past is there to haunt, hiding and creeping just out of sight. But eventually it catches up with us and no amount of distraction will keep it away. Tradition in Good Indians horrifies and haunts when we ignore it but drifts away leaving hope when we come to terms with it, warts and all.
Jones’s The Only Good Indians terrified me at times, repulsed me at others, and made me feel something in a horror novel that I haven’t felt in a while: hope. Hope that forgiveness is still available and that redemption is possible despite generations of suffering and ignorance. Maybe then the shift from horror to allegory is more akin to the stories we used to tell around fires, tales that used fear and disgust to motivate, teach and explore our place in the world of competing identities and traditions. In Good Indians that process is ugly, bloody, and horrific, but it is ultimately productive despite its discomfort.
Kyle Brett is a Ph.D. candidate at Lehigh University who studies nineteenth-century American literature and Transatlantic Romanticism. He also is a horror buff and avid weird fiction reader, you can follow him on Twitter @burntcheerios. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on Alma Katsu’s novel, The Deep, It, Cargo, and, mostly recently, on the film Sea Fever and the working-class weird.
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