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Indian Killer is the Sherman Alexie novel that critics struggled with on release in 1996 and that I still think gets undersold. The plot scaffolding is a serial-killer story. A killer in Seattle is targeting white men and leaving owl feathers at the scene. The investigation, and the racial panic the killings generate, run through a cast that includes a Native adoptee raised by white parents, a campus radical, a talk-radio host, and a homeless Native veteran.
Alexie is not writing a thriller. He is writing a novel about the unmetabolized violence at the foundation of American Indian-white relations and what it does to everyone close to it, including the Native characters who have nothing to do with the killings. The book is angry and unstable on purpose. It does not resolve into anything comforting.
Some of the early reviews accused the book of being irresponsible. I think it is one of the more honest American novels of its decade about race and class anger. Four stars. Read it with both eyes open.
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If you liked Indian Killer
Reservation Blues
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Sherman Alexie's first novel. Robert Johnson hands his guitar to a kid on the Spokane Reservation. Magic realism with grief in the bones.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
YA semi-memoir about a kid who transfers off the rez to a white school. Funny, brutal, repeatedly banned, deserves to be read.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
by Sherman Alexie
The Alexie short story collection that made his career. Some of these became Smoke Signals. All of them earn their place.
The Toughest Indian in the World
by Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie's 2000 story collection. Tougher, sadder, more sexually frank than Lone Ranger and Tonto. The follow-up earns itself.
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