The Only Good Indians

 Hello Interwebs!

This book review will put me all caught up through the end of October, save for the three books in Elin Hilderbrand's Paradise Trilogy. I'm currently reading the third book in the trilogy and I'll do a review for the full trilogy when I'm done with it. 

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is an adult horror novel based on American Indian lore. Stephen Graham Jones is a member of the Blackfeet tribe which is the same as the tribe in the book. It follows four friends who have an incident while hunting elk just before Thanksgiving one year and now nearly ten years later some entity they've angered is after them. I really enjoyed this book, it's a more cerebral slow burn horror that challenges what is real and what is not real and how much of what the four men experience is real and how much is interpretation due to their own paranoia and fear. I read this book from the 15th to the 26th and gave it a solid 5 stars. As always spoilers after the picture. 

The prologue of the novel follows Rick, the first of the four friends to die. He has since left the reservation and is having a drink in a bar. He leaves the bar to pee and sees an elk in the parking lot. As he tries to get away from the elk, one that reminds him of a mysterious hunting incident in his past, he sees more elk who begin to cause damage in the parking lot coming after him. He picks up a crowbar to fight back and begins destroying cars trying to fight back. As the men outside the bar begin to pursue him, that's when we realize that only Rick can see the elk and as far as the men know he's the one destroying the cars. They hunt him down and beat him to death as he sees the elk looking on.

After the prologue we're introduced to another of the four friends, Lewis, who is the only other one who has escaped the reservation. He's living a distance away and working as a mailman, married to a white woman. When we first see him he's fixing their ceiling light and when he looks down through the ceiling fan he sees a doe elk laying on the living room floor and falls off the ladder. Through Lewis's perspective we find out what happened with the four friends during the elk hunt. The weekend before Thanksgiving they had been hunting, unsuccessfully, and crossed into the area of the reservation restricted for the elders and came across a herd of elk in a little gully by the lake. For the teenagers its like shooting fish in a barrel. They kill more than enough elk to keep them supplied with meat for a long time. In amongst the herd of bull elk however, is a single young pregnant cow. She fights valiantly and is shot three times before she dies. Then their hunt goes from triumphant to disgraceful. The boys are caught by the game warden and made to abandon the entire hunt, except for the cow. The boys receive a ten year hunting ban which culminates in the supernatural destruction that takes place in this book. 

After seeing the elk on the floor, Lewis becomes obsessed as his life begins to spiral out of his control. His dog is found hanging from his chain over the fence and while he's languishing in the garage, Lewis and his wife find the dog has been trampled by something in the garage. Lewis begins to see an elk=headed woman everywhere and becomes convinced its the Crow woman he works with at the post office. He lures her to his house and kills her, then when his wife returns home he kills her too and cuts an elk fetus out of her womb before going on the run. He is caught just before arriving back on the reservation and shot by state troopers who acknowledge the elk calf he's got with him when they throw them in the back of the truck. The truck later crashes when a young Indian woman jumps from the bed and when they look later, the elk calf is gone. 

After Lewis's death you see Gabe and Cassidy, the last two boys, preparing for a sweat with a boy who goes to school with Gabe's teenaged daughter. During the sweat the elk-headed woman appears. She kills the boys father, a reservation cop, and then begins to exact her revenge on the other two men. She stomps Cassidy's dogs making it look like Gabe did it and stole Cassidy's money. Then as the two friends fight, Cassidy's girlfriend is squashed by a broken down truck (the same truck that they took on the hunt so long ago) when Gabe shoves it off the cinderblocks. Cassidy shoots at him and hits what Gabe believes is his daughter. Gabe beats Cassidy to death before Gabe is killed as well. When Gabe's daughter, Denorah, comes to get money her dad owes her and finds the spirit masquerading as Lewis's coworker. 

The two young women square off on the basketball court before Denorah flees the spirit. The boy from the sweat lodge, barely alive, runs across her while he's fleeing towards town on a horse and she tells him to get her step-father, the game warden who busted her father and his friends and that she's leading the spirit to the lake. With the spirit in pursuit, Denorah leads her down to the same clearing where the elk hunt took place and the elk suddenly gives up her pursuit of Denorah as she digs up the grave where Lewis buried the calf all those years ago. As the elk spirit is reunited with her calf, Denorah's step-father appears on the ridge and takes aim, Denorah gets between them and stops him from shooting. 

And that's where the novel ends. It's gruesome adn bloody, especially Lewis's killing of the two women and the entire scene with the sweat lodge massacre but it ends with a moment of peace, Denorah righting the wrong that took place all those years before. The elk-headed woman is reunited with her calf and has her revenge on the men who behaved so shamefully those years before and Denorah (Gabe's calf) gets to live as well. The precipitating event wasn't necessarily the hunt, it was the disgracefulness of slaughtering more elk than they could've packed out plus having to throw most of them back due to breaking the rules on the reservation by hunting where they weren't allowed. 

This was an excellent book and I enjoyed every moment of it. It was dark and macabre and I enjoyed the native spirituality at the heart of it. All in all a most excellent horror novel, one I think I will end up buying (this was an ebook I got from the library) and rereading from time to time. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle