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. 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. 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.įor those readers interested in environmental politics, the elk-woman is surely the character to train your focus on. Refusing to die, the cow elk struggles against Lewis’ bullets to protect the unborn calf. Lewis, one of the novel’s central characters, strikes a cow elk who, unbeknownst to the hunters, is carrying a calf. Despite its being forbidden for the friends to hunt there, the four men open fire on the herd, killing many of the elk. Four friends, unlucky in their hunts before Thanksgiving, find themselves overlooking a herd of elk on their elders’ hunting ground on a Blackfoot reservation. The story is at its core a supernatural revenge plot. You can find Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians on Amazon: 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. The Only Good Indians (2020), Stephen Graham Jones’s latest novel, often feels weighed down by a distant, but strong, tradition.

The only good indians novel