Stephen Graham Jones' THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS with a slight detour into other media about Native American pop culture

 My sister and I have almost caught up on the available episodes of FX's goddamned delightful new series, Reservation Dogs, which hits all kinds of right notes with me that aren't all just remembering how much I love Smoke Signals although of course I screamed in Episode Four when Gary Fucking Farmer showed up as an old time pot-smoking bar-fighting "uncle" to one of our teen protagonists and stole the show every bit as much as he did in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and, to a lesser degree, in Smoke Signals, so hell yes, I realized it was high time that I checked out Stephen Graham Jones, especially since every recommendation algorithm the internet throws at me (possibly, in 2021, already all the same algorithm? Or I'm even more predictable than I think I am, which is very, but maybe it's very very) has been showing me this book for going on a year now.

Deep breath.

Also, it's spooky season. And while once again I'm at least partly wanting to focus on Spooky in Translation like I did last year, it totally felt like it was finally time to check out The Only Good Indians, which already had my attention based on that title and cover alone. I've had close encounters with deer, elk and moose that have left me seriously thanking my lucky stars I didn't get stomped or gored or worse, so I was primed for a good old fashioned animal revenge tale but with Blackfeet -- but I got so much more.

The Only Good Indians -- the title, of course, refers to the terrible old adage that the only good Indian is a dead Indian but the book, if nothing else, is interested in showing us that like the rest of the human race, all Indians are complicated, flawed people, trying their best, sometimes doing their worst, often punished by circumstances disproportionate to their failings, and haunted by a history of living in a land their ancestors cherished long before European settlers showed up and started coining adages like this one and committing genocide.

Stephen Graham Jones is not interested in litigating that here -- or at least not much, but in depicting his characters' lives as they are both on and off a reservation, a certain degree of litigating that here can't help but happen -- so much as focusing on four friends who happen to be Blackfeet, Ricky, Lewis, Gabe and Cass, and their moral universes. As young and stupid men, the friends went on a frustrating late season elk hunt on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and after an unsuccessful morning make a desperate and dumb decision to go hunt on a parcel of land that is reserved for elderly Blackfeet only, breaking U.S. law and risking prosecution, but also breaking their own codes when they come across a herd and massacre a bunch, including a cow elk who turns out to be pregnant out of season and is suspiciously -- maybe even supernaturally -- hard to kill. As the men start field dressing their kills, it draws late, so late that darkness is falling, and there is at least one game warden out there on patrol who just might catch them, and so they make the horrifying decision to waste a whole lot of the meat. They're just going to take hindquarters and leave the rest to rot and scavengers. And then they start on the pregnant cow elk that was so hard to kill. Her calf is still alive, struggling in its amniotic sac. And Lewis makes a vow not to let any of this cow go to waste. Furthermore, as he promises after the game warden catches them in the act, he'll give all of her meat away to the elders who are the only ones who should have it anyway. Freezers don't fill themselves, especially when a hunter is maybe a bit too old to hunt.

But of course, once that meat is given away, Lewis can't really control what happens to it, can he? He can't stop it, from say, working its way down to the bottom of someone's freezer over the course of a few years until it's out of the freezer geezer's reach until the geezer dies and... But we don't know for sure something like that happened...

So these guys, as the actual story begins (almost exactly ten years later and with an absolutely bonkers scene in a North Dakota honky tonk parking lot), are carrying a heavy moral load, which alone would make for a fine story, but SGJ isn't interested in focusing on that. We're here for a horror story, folks, and there was indeed something supernatural about that pregnant cow elk. Supernatural and conscious and very, very patient. If Lewis' promise isn't kept 100%, Hell is coming with sharp hooves and big teeth and 500+ pounds of fury.

But might not look it.

We get to know these men and, to a degree, the women in their lives, very, very well as the supernatural force they unleashed begins stalking them. They are, in their different ways, trying (if not always succeeding; one is basically a dead-beat dad, after all) to be better men than they were; perhaps they have learned from their transgression. A different writer might focus on that and give us a story of redemption.

But not this one.

Stephen Graham Jones is an astonishing storyteller. The Only Good Indians is tightly plotted, superbly crafted, turns over like a fine engine on a lovingly restored antique motorcycle. The characters will capture and then break your hearts even before they start suffering their spectacularly gory and intricately executed comeuppances. The supernatural elk spirit avenging herself doesn't use her teeth or hooves or bulk unless she has to, because she also has human-level smarts and cunning. The traps she sets for them are worthy of a human Patricia Highsmith character (I invoke her because she is the absolute mistress of the animal revenge story) and display a level of insight into these characters weaknesses that we have discovered right along with her. As a horror villain, she is utterly unique (though the episode of Reservoir Dogs featuring Deer Woman shows us that she is a villain with roots in tribal culture and let me tell you, seeing that episode on the day that I finished reading this book was a trip!), compelling enough to feel both frightening and sympathetic.

A final note: I wouldn't be surprised at all if Stephen Graham Jones doesn't someday turn his hand to writing novels about sports. They'll be brilliant, if several passages in which various characters work out their stuff on makeshift basketball courts* are anything to go by. The slow-building climax to the story even heavily features maybe the most tension-riddled, high stakes game of one-on-one ever committed to the page. But even the basketball stuff is kind of heartbreaking, as a subplot with an eighth grade girl who is a basketball phenomenon shows us: at just 13 or 14 years old, she is already all too familiar with the kind of racism a powerful Native American sports team faces when they play other schools. I only know of this by anecdote, though: I grew up in Wyoming, which only has one reservation and one Native American high school, which dominates in basketball every year. One thing that was always cool was when they came to play in my home town, against my school, because it seemed like the entire Wind River reservation came to town to watch the game and support their teams. It was always the best attended game of the year, with an absolutely packed and boistrous gymnasium, a special night (and yes, they usually beat our asses). I'm pretty sure it's like that for most of their away games. I'd like to think it's not just because they turned out in tremendous numbers that they got what always seemed to me to be a pretty good welcome (but my perspective might be skewed because my dad and their bus driver, the extraordinary Gary Medicine Cloud, were good friends so these games were something we tended to look forward to in our family), but the young woman in this novel, Denorah, has had experiences that suggest it's otherwise elsewhere. I don't know if Blackfeet basketball mounts a small invasion of other towns when they travel for games or not, but is that part of the difference? I couldn't help wondering about this as I read.

I don't read sports fiction, am not even sure if that's a thing apart from in the movies, but if Stephen Graham Jones ever decides to write some, I'll for sure read it. And I'm pretty stoked to read his newest novel, which is, I'm told, horror fiction not centered on his heritage, too.

Basically, I'm a fan now. Wow!

*One of these is a dead ringer in prose for the court my dad built for my sister and I when we were kids. A friend of his with a concrete business had a client flake out on him and he had a mixer full of stuff going to waste, so my dad made some kind of a deal with him to pour it into some hasty forms he threw down, then he put up a basket and made a backboard for it out of plywood. The concrete was already too far set to really get it leveled out, and wasn't really meant for this purpose, so it was a bumpy and unpredictable surface upon which to learn to dribble, etc. And the backboard was much narrower than regulation. But damned if that didn't turn my little sister into a deadeye shooter, and a pretty good guard who was ready for surprises! I regret that I never got to see her play as a high school starter; we were only in high school together for one year, my senior year, and I was on the speech team, which has a season from November through March, with the kids on the road every weekend, so I didn't get to see her then, and I certainly didn't see any of the rest of her career once I was thousands of miles away at Bard. Le sigh.