What happens when the hunters become the hunted? The Only Good Indians by renowned indigenous author Stephen Graham Jones was one of the most-talked about horror novels this year and came out back in July. I finally decided to check out for myself whether it lives up to the hype.
Four friends are haunted by one particular day from their misspent youth on the Blackfeet Reservation. Ricky, Lewis, Gabe, and Cass had gone hunting for elk and glory one Saturday just before Thanksgiving. But in their excitement and hubris they managed to violate not just the local hunting laws but the basic ethics of hunting. Now, ten years later, the spirit of the elk they killed is ready to take her revenge. Ricky had been one of the first to flee the reservation—and the first to come to an untimely end in the parking lot outside a North Dakota bar. The others have each tried to move on with their lives in the intervening years since the disgraceful incident. Lewis has married a white woman and left the reservation and his roots far behind. Gabe escapes into alcoholism and hangs his hopes for the future on his basketball-star daughter. Cass is ready to finally settle down and make something of himself alongside the love of his life, Jolene. But as the ten-year anniversary of their unfortunate hunting episode approaches, a vengeful spirit is determined to make each of these men feel the depths of fear and desperation that they inflicted on the elk all those years ago.
Much of the first half of the novel is from the perspective of Lewis, the only one of the group to successfully make it out of the reservation and create a new life for himself. Lewis is a particularly unsettling sort of unreliable narrator. In the right kind of horror story, he would be the one to survive—his penchant for reading fantasy novels has made him quick to accept the supernatural and to spin a narrative that makes sense out of the hints and clues around him that something is wrong. But Lewis’s genre-savvy is more curse than blessing. The reader can only watch in horror as Lewis puts the puzzle pieces together all wrong and leaps to an incomplete conclusion. Lewis essentially orchestrates his own destruction in a tragedy that sets the tone for the rest of the book.
The monster of the story, Elk Head Woman, is a unique horror story antagonist. As a man-killing nature spirit, she’s somewhat reminiscent of the three-antlered deer in Margaret Killjoy’s The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion. But Elk Head Woman is not just an abstract concept come to life. She’s a victim, herself, and her anger is righteous. The narrative techniques of referring to her in the second person and giving us scenes from her perspective cause the reader to identify with her and feel some sympathy for her cause. But though her thirst for revenge may be understandable, her machinations lead to the deaths of many more innocent victims, human and animal alike. In this cycle of violence and trauma, there is no winner.
Though the body count makes this novel seem almost like a slasher horror, it’s really a tale of slow-building dread and heart-wrenching tragedy. Despite the bleak inevitability of the horrors it depicts, the novel manages to pull off a more uplifting ending that extolls the value of connecting with our traditions in order to heal. If you think your heart can handle this emotional rollercoaster, go ahead and pick up a copy of The Only Good Indians for yourself. You can find it on shelves at your favorite local retailer or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Let me know what you think of the book in the comments!