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The only good indians novel5/19/2023 The racialized dynamic of the attack is its focal point, Jones delineating the body politics of the beat-down. The novel puts its ideas on the table almost immediately with a prologue in which the first of the four main characters, Ricky Boss Ribs, is jumped by a group of white guys from his construction crew outside a dive bar. They are not the entre, but the garnish upon it. The killings are shocking, yes, but they feel like exclamation points on larger ideas. In one sense, it’s a paint-by-numbers horror novel, but Jones is far too nimble a writer to be pinned down by convention. The vengeful spirit manifests as a woman with the head of an elk who tracks the group down one by one to exact revenge. The Only Good Indians follows a friend group of Blackfeet a decade after they trespass on hunting land reserved for tribal elders and slaughter a herd of elk, including a pregnant cow who refuses to die easily. It’s unabashedly a slasher, and blood is plentiful, but a deeper layer runs through the material as Jones, a Blackfeet native, uses the trappings of horror to delve into a dissection of contemporary Native American identity. The prolific horror writer proudly wears that label on his sleeve, leaning into schlocky tropes of the trade in his new novel, The Only Good Indians. Stephen Graham Jones has never been boxed in by genres.
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