“Four Blackfeet men who committed a hunting transgression a decade earlier are tracked across the present-day American West by something that wants the moral debt paid. Bram Stoker Award 2020.”
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
The Only Good Indians is Stephen Graham Jones's 2020 horror novel, the Bram Stoker Award winner and the literary-horror breakout that established Jones for a much larger audience after thirty earlier novels and collections. The structural premise is a ten-year-old hunting transgression by four young Blackfeet men on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana — Ricky, Lewis, Gabe, and Cassidy hunted a herd of elk in a section of the reservation that elders had set aside for tribal hunting only, and shot too many. The novel opens with Ricky's strange death in North Dakota and runs forward to the present-day reckoning that comes due to the surviving three men one decade later, in a form that requires them to recognize the elk in their own hunting party returning for the moral debt.
Jones's structural method is the patient three-act construction in which each of the three surviving hunters gets a section of the novel: Lewis in the front third (a Glacier Park casino-shuttle driver living in Great Falls with his white wife), Gabe and Cassidy in the middle and back thirds (still on the reservation, with families and basketball-coaching jobs and the kind of daily texture the contemporary American horror novel rarely provides). The novel's structural argument (that horror as a contemporary American literary form has work to do in writing back against the European folkloric tradition that has dominated the genre for two centuries) is made through the specific Blackfeet-cultural texture of the present-tense reservation chapters rather than through any direct argument. The basketball sequence in the back third is one of the most carefully written contemporary American literary-horror set-pieces in recent memory.
Recommended as required contemporary horror reading, as the right Jones entry point, and as the canonical contemporary Indigenous American literary horror novel. Read My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021, the Indian Lake trilogy opener) next. Compare to Tommy Orange's There There and Louise Erdrich's The Sentence on the broader contemporary Indigenous American literary shelf. The Shaun Taylor-Corbett audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked The Only Good Indians
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1985 review. A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849. The most violent American novel of the late twentieth century and the rare McCarthy book that demands the prose attention it requires.
Bring Up the Bodies
by Hilary Mantel
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel 2012 review. Thomas Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn and the rise of Jane Seymour. Booker Prize 2012, the second volume of the Cromwell trilogy, and the rare novel that exceeds an already-canonical predecessor.
It
by Stephen King
It by Stephen King 1986 review. Seven friends return to Derry, Maine, to face the shape-shifting evil they fought as children. One of the great American novels about childhood and the past.
James
by Percival Everett
James by Percival Everett 2024 review. A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved man Jim, in his own voice. The most important American novel of 2024 and the right Everett entry point.
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 2021 review. Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches the children passing by the storefront and waits to be chosen. Late-career Ishiguro at his most patient and most strange.
More by this author