“Lewis has the idea that by returning to where that cycle of violence started he can somehow apologize or close the circle. “I’ve always been poking and prodding at the possibility that the pattern shouldn’t be repeated,” Jones says. “That is how 99% of American Indian novels went for a long time, but I wanted to push back against that.”Įventually, after a series of increasingly bloody murders, Lewis finds himself limping back to the reservation in a desperate attempt to save himself. The way to be successful is being part of the community,” Jones says. “In American Indian culture, the person who rises above and says he’s different is turning his back on his community. Jones is the kind of writer who notices a trend and leans his shoulder in the opposite direction. Jones is aware of working within the larger genres of horror and Native American fiction, but he’s always looking for ways to subvert expectations. “That craziness, that heat of the moment, the blood in his temples, smoke in the air, it was like-he hates himself the most for this-it was probably what it was like a century and more ago, when soldiers gathered up on ridges above Blackfeet encampments to turn the cranks on their big guns, terraform this new land for their occupation. The first section of the book focuses on Lewis, who left the reservation shortly after the incident but often finds himself remembering that day. The memory of the elk slaughter sticks with each character. Violence and gore pulse through Jones’ novels, and The Only Good Indians is no exception. We spoke in mid-March and the book’s publication, originally set for April, was pushed to July because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Slashers love anniversaries,” Jones tells me over the phone from his home in Boulder. They slaughter a herd of elk, including a pregnant cow, and their actions that day haunt their memories until, on the 10th anniversary of the slaughter, they become the hunted. Before the novel begins, Lewis, Cassidy, Ricky, and Gabe go hunting on land set aside by the Blackfeet Reservation for elders. The Only Good Indians (Saga/Simon Schuster, July 14) tells the story of four friends being hunted down by an elk that might be a demon or a ghost but is definitely an angry mother.

For a couple decades and a couple dozen books, novelist Stephen Graham Jones has concocted a delicious literary stew out of rare ingredients: decades of slasher flicks a deep abiding love of “losers” a relentless narrative voice that pulls the reader along at a thousand miles an hour and the experience of growing up in the American West as a member of the Blackfeet Nation.

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