From the Blackfeet Reservation to Great Falls, Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians Will Scare You Good
The inimitable — and prolific Blackfeet master of horror is back with a killer of a book. The Only Good Indians (out with Saga/Simon & Schuster onJuly 14, 2020), will take you up to the Blackfeet reservation and down to Great Falls, and along the way, it’ll scare you good. Four men are being haunted — and hunted — by a vengeful spirit who won’t rest until she takes them down, one by one.
Lewis is your average rez dude turned sort-of-suburbanite, with his super-athletic, super-cool white wife Peta, his job at the Post Office, and his bumbling-yet-charming crush on the Native girl who works with him. But one day, in climbing the stepladder to fix a light, in-between the blades of the fan, he sees an animal he killed back home — in a way he still knows was wrong. So begins his descent into a world of paranoia that brings out all of his fears and insecurities about the choices he’s made to get to this point in his life. Lewis loves his wife, but wonders what it means as a Native man to have chosen to be with a white wife — who doesn’t want children. He also can’t help but wonder if it was the right move for him to even leave the rez — and the spirit that haunts him pushes on these insecurities — until they become full manifestations –with gory consequences. What follows are the stories of the friends he hunted with, years ago — most of who stayed — some who made bad choices — and the fight for their lives that all of them — and their children — must now face.
Subtly funny, and trigger warning: definitely gory, this novel is engaging — and as per Jones’ usual, beautiful and strange. In many ways, this novel moves Native literature in a direction only Jones knows how, as it allows for the kind of writing and world-building that moves beyond the traditional, and into the new, without losing its Native roots.
Jones, a winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Award, a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction, and winner of the Bram Stoker Award for long fiction has given us a story that will stay long in our minds — even if in nightmare form.
