A review by fatimaelf
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

What a weird and wild ride. This book is not in my preferred genre of literature — I don’t read horror, generally, because it makes me sad, because it almost definitely contains death, and murder, and often the people who die don’t really deserve it, if anyone can deserve death. 

That said, I liked this one. Against my better judgement, I really, really liked it. Jones’s storytelling ability is top-notch; it feels meandering, but it’s such a tight, richly compelling narrative style that I flew through chapters almost without realizing it. His mastery of metaphor, of suspense, of mystery was truly admirable.

This book was about a lot of things. It’s a book about identity and revenge. About generational trauma and Native traditions. About past and present. About predator and prey. 

I’d say the book was half literary, half horror. It’s split in three parts, plus a prologue. Part one, which focuses on Lewis, that’s by far the strongest section of the novel. Lewis was a truly compelling character: his struggle of being off the reservation, but rooted in it; of being proud of his heritage, but attempting to move past it, was the most captivating part of his character. His interactions with his wife, Peta, a white woman, and his coworker, Shaney, also a Native but of a different tribe, emphasized the seeming split between him. I admired Lewis, but his quick descent into paranoia and madness really emphasized the part of him that was shaped and molded by the trauma of all the people that came before him: when his past collided with his present, when the reservation slammed into the Western world, he unraveled like string, and though that’s not the beginning of our tragedy, it’s where we, the audience, start with it. Though I’m not normally a fan of ambiguity, the persistent question of whether what Lewis was seeing was real or imagined was the best part of the novel.

Jones is a master at revealing information at the right time. Thankfully, he doesn’t let us stew in wondering what happened before and why it matters now. Well before we’re a third of the way through the book, we’re told the catalyst for why what’s happening is happening, though Lewis is unsure why it’s happening ten years after the fact.

I’m not too familiar with Native traditions, but I’m familiar enough to know that what Lewis and his three friends — Ricky, Gabe, and Cass — did that day ten years ago was a cardinal sin in tribal laws. The culling of ten elk on land that wasn’t theirs to hunt on was short-sighted, selfish, and wasteful. It may be difficult, I think, for a lot of Westerners to understand because of the proliferation of poachers, but the fact that the last moments of these animals’ lives were filled with pain and fear for no reason, not even to provide food, clothing, or shelter in the end, does strike me as the type of wrong that shouldn’t go unpunished, especially against the backdrop of Jones’s description of Native culture and history.

The only cinch I had, small as though it may be, even as I justify it, is that if it’s revenge the spirit wanted, then it’s odd that innocents died in the process. True, those innocents were related to the men who did the deed,
and all the elk that day were technically innocent as well — plus, laying dormant for ten years with nothing to think about but your butchered baby and your slaughtered family would be enough to warp even the most well intentioned of vengeful spirits, of which Po’noka was not. Also, Lewis had a point in that if every dead animal sought revenge for its death, then wouldn’t many more people be getting haunted? Answered, in part, by Po’noka herself: the dance between predator and prey is built on fair play. What occurred at Duck Lake was, by no account, fair or right.

So, yeah, once I kinda got over myself, and I understood that a whole lot of what was happening was based heavily around metaphor, the ride went a lot smoother. Still, I really liked about half the characters, and many of their deaths were just sad to me — I didn’t think they were deserved
(especially the dogs! what did the Elk Woman have against dogs!) but then again, neither were the elk deaths at Duck Lake.

The second part mostly follows the demise of Gabe and Cass, at a sweat lodge. This past was also easy to read, because you just want to know how it’s all gonna go down, but it was less compelling than Lewis’s. We were able to really get to know Lewis, really understand his struggle to live in two worlds, and I don’t think we were given the same ability to understand Cass and Gabe to the same extent. That’s not to say we’re given nothing: their experience of staying at the reservation, when Ricky and Lewis left, was also an interesting perspective, especially with the added detail that most everyone on the res dreams of leaving when they grow up, and then end up staying put. I liked Cass a hell of a lot more than I liked Gabe, but I understood that both men were a reflection of, again, the past of their people, plus the reality of their personal past and present. 

I wish we’d gotten to know Ricky more, but his single prologue chapter was explosive and so chilling, and did a fantastic job at setting the tone for the rest of the book. 

I will say that Jones has a real skill with folding the horror aspect of this book in with all the rest — the character insight, the rumination on Native identity. He writes the most gruesome, horrifying prose in such a matter-of-fact, subtle way that it sends you reeling before you even register what you’re reading. This is most prominent in Lewis’s section: the slow build up to dread, the quick payoff in gore and violence, the come down in delusion and justification. 

The third part of the book, following Gabe’s daughter Deborah, was a study in both basketball (weirdly enough), survival, and mercy. There was a good twenty or so pages where Deborah’s just playing basketball with a literal demonic entity, and it’s weird and definitely jarring, but I thought it was as important an aspect to the story as hunting, or the sweat lodge. Basketball seems to be a big thing on the res, the ticket to the world beyond,
and this scene being the one where the Elk Head Woman slowly loses her veneer and shows her true self feels important
. I will say it killed some of the tension considering it was immediately preceded by a horribly gruesome, like, quadruple murder, but it felt like a brief reprieve before ratcheting up the tension again, when Denorah flees for her life. 

The ending was…tricky for me. I thought it was the best ending possible, this act of mercy by the child of the man you killed but who also killed you and your child — and I especially liked the call-back to Lewis’s explanation of Native story structure, that they loop back on each other, end the way they began, and the call back to Cass and Gabe’s teachings to Nate, that they want better for the generations that come after, they want them to be able to leave and escape. And certainly, revenge is cyclical, and we’re shown that the elk pass down stories and warnings like people do —
but I’m not totally convinced that the death of the Elk Head Woman, whose actions resulted in the death of at least eight people and four dogs, would have continued that cycle.
I’m not saying I don’t believe it. I’m just saying I wish we would’ve gotten some clearer insight into how this would have kept going — a line or two, a paragraph at most. But I did like the ending, and I think it was a mic drop last line. 

The only reason the book didn’t get the full five stars is mostly because Lewis’s section sort of felt complete on its own, and continued the ambiguity of the realism of the demonic entity.
To have her confirmed as real sort of took away some of that power, and so
it felt almost like two short stories linked together with the thin chain of shared history, rather than a completely realized, connected novel.

To be honest I might need to start reading more horror, if this type of story is what I’ve been missing out on. I’ll definitely be reading more of Stephen Graham Jones in the future. 
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