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#the only good indians
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This year some of my favourite books I read were written by indigenous American authors and I just wanted to shout out a couple that I fell in love with
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The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
Horror being my second most read genre, I did not think books could still get under my skin the way this one did lol. It follows four Blackfoot men who are seemingly being hunted by a vengeful... something... years after a fateful hunting trip that happened just before they went their separate ways. The horror, the dread, the something... pure nightmare fuel 10/10
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
An apocalyptic novel following an isolated Anishinaabe community in the far north who lose contact with the outside world. When two of their young men return from their college with dire news, they set about planning on how to survive the winter, but when outsiders follow, lines are drawn in the community that might doom them all. This book is all dread all the time, the use of dreams and the inevitability of conflict weighs heavy til the very end. An excellent apocalypse story if you're into that kind of thing.
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
This book follows Jade, a deeply troubled mixed race teenager with a shitty homelife who's *obsessed* with slasher movies. When she finds evidence that there's a killer running about her soon-to-be gentrified small town, she weaponises that knowledge to predict what's going to happen next. I don't think this book will work for most people, it's a little stream of consciousness, Jade's head is frequently a very difficult place to be in, but by the last page I had so much love for her as a character and the emotional rollercoaster she's on that I had to mention it here.
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
Taking a bit of a left turn but this charming YA murder mystery really stuck with me this year. Elatsoe is a teenage girl living in an America where myths, monsters, and magic are all real every day occurrences. When her cousin dies mysteriously with no witnesses, she decides to do whatever she can, including using her ability to raise the spirits of dead animals, to solve the case. The worldbuilding was just really fun in this one, but the Native American myths and influence were the shining star for me, and the asexual rep was refreshing to see in a YA book too tbh
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
The audiobook, the audiobook, the audiobook!!!! Also the physical book because formatting and illustrations, but the audiobook!!! Tanya Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer, and this novel is a genre blending of 20 years worth of the authors journal entries, poetry, and short stories, that culminates in a truly unique story about a young girl surviving her teenage years in a small tundra town in the 70s. It is sad and beautiful and hard but an experience like nothing else I read this year.
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brokehorrorfan · 5 months
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I Was a Teenage Slasher by New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians) will be published on July 16, 2024 via Simon & Schuster.
A slasher story told from the killer's perspective, the 384-page horror novel will be available in hardcover, e-book, and audio book. Jon Bush designed the jacket cover. Read on for the synopsis.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.
Pre-order I Was a Teenage by Stephen Graham Jones.
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literary-illuminati · 1 month
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2024 Book Review #8 – The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham James
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This has been on my tbr for long enough that I entirely forget what originally put it there – the only thing I actually knew going in was that the author was ‘the My Heart is a Chainsaw guy’ (I have not read My Heart is a Chainsaw yet either). Given the genre, that was honestly probably ideal. As was the fact that a blizzard hit a couple days after I started it and I’ve been reading it looking out on a frozen snowscape – it’s very much a winter sort of story.
The story’s told in five parts of wildly varying lengths, each with it’s own endearingly cheesy b-horror movie title and each following a different protagonist. The first four each follow one of a friend group who, as a bunch of fuckup teenagers, trespassed on hunting grounds that were really supposed to be reserved for elders and shot a bunch of elk they had no right to – including a pregnant young cow who was for one reason or another special. Ten years later, the Elk-Headed Woman drags herself back into the world, and begins getting her vengeance for the death of her and her child on each of them (and everyone they care about) in turn.
I have a longstanding opinion that a full-length novel is just too long to sustain a real horror story – by 300 pages things have fairly reliably collapse into urban fantasy or action or farce. The breakup into different parts solves this very well – they’re all very much connected and interwoven, but each feels like its own distinct narrative unit with its own tension and rising action.
And this is very much a horror story in the classic, just barely short of shlocky sense. A trespass against vague but understood sacred laws that leads to horrific and bloody retribution against everyone involved is as close to archtypal horror as you can possibly get, after all. The last section is even focused on a Final Girl! Specifically, it’s a subgenre that I can’t really name but feels very familiar to me – and one I’ve always been a huge fan of, anyway. It’s somewhere downstream of The Count of Monte Cristo, a story where the agent of supernatural doom spends the majority of the story consciously working in the background, manipulating events and exacerbating the protagonist/victim’s flaws to lead them to a contrived but tragic end? Think the netflix Fall of the House of Usher, but like about the exact opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Class is very much something the book cares about. All four protagonists grew up poor on a reservation with little in the way of wealth or opportunity, and by the time they’d turned eighteen all four of them were the kind of young asshole who made life just a little bit worse for everyone around them dealing with the same shit. Ten years latter the three of them who’ve survived that long have gotten over themselves and matured in their own way (and to their own degree), but none of them are exactly flush with cash or living lives of bourgeois respectability (though Lewis comes close). The precarity and only tenuous connections to the society around them just make them better prey for what’s hunting them, of course – in every case, death comes after the (either metaphorical or very viscerally literal) destruction of the few close ties they have, and the only one to survive is also the only one who could really expect people to come rushing to their rescue.
Speaking of close ties the protagonists have – the book’s conception of gender is fascinatingly weird, or at least fascinating in the sense that I’m not at all sure how intentional it is. Of the four main victims, one dies alone at eighteen, and the other three who survive the next ten years are all pretty much explicitly saved (or at least improved and uplifted) by a relationship with a woman who, if not flawless, is basically strictly his moral and practical better. Even the most consistent fuckup of the group has a redeeming feature of being willing to do just about anything for his daughter (despite having lost the chance to really be a big part of her life several times over). With one exception, these women all then die, messily, entirely and explicitly to fuck with and ruin the lives of their men. It’s like someone read Women in Refrigerators and went ‘well there’s an idea...’. It’s blatant enough that I feel like it’s got to be making a deliberate point, but (unless it’s just genre emulation) what the point is does escape me slightly.
Also on the note of stuff I’m quite sure is going over my head at least a bit – basketball! It’s a pretty vital thread running through the entire book, to the point that one of the big set pieces of the final act is literally a basketball game with the monster. Which, like, I watched enough bad anime as a small child to find contrived game-playing under unclear mythic rules with things that really want to kill you instinctively endearing, but I can’t really do anything with this except just point at it.
So as the title might imply, this is a novel that’s concerned with race – all but I believe exactly one character is either is either Blackfeet or Crow, more than half the book takes place on a reservation, and a chunk of the rest is spent having to deal with racist assholes of varying severity. Now, I admit that I have at this point a probably overly cynical view of books that end up on breathless ‘socially conscious horror’ or ‘s/ff from diverse creators you NEED to read’ lists online, but I was still rather pleasantly by how matter-of-factly this was handled? I suppose the best way to put it is that culture, upbringing and racialization deeply inform everyone’s characters, but it never feels like the book is preoccupied with providing some assumed naive and impressionable audience any Important Lessons or provide Good Representation to valourize or emulate? Which is probably just a sign I need to raise and re calibrate my expectations, but.
The monster doesn’t exactly work as, like, a coherent character in terms of her skills and abilities, but as a monster the Elk-Headed Woman is great. But then I love contrived fucked up tragedies and am a longstanding partisan of Spooky Deer Horror, so I suppose I would say that.
So yeah, fun read!
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gabelish · 5 months
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The Only Good Indians // Stephen Graham Jones
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thedaddycomplex · 8 months
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Deer Lady from Reservation Dogs and Elk Head Woman from Stephen Graham Jones' book The Only Good Indians is the horror team-up we need.
[Elk Head Woman 🎨 by @shoomlah]
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valencitaflaherty · 3 months
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all of these i'm looking forward to reading, which is exactly why i have trouble picking one to start with. i'll be going in order of most to least votes.
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caribeandthebooks · 1 month
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Caribe's Mystery/Thriller/Horror Fiction TBR - Part 1
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aquitainequeen · 8 months
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First character in The Only Good Indians: *is haunted and driven to his death by ghost elk*
Me: Damn. What happened to cause that?
The narrative: *reveals that in the backstory he and his friends once hunted and killed a whole load of elk in an area reserved for the tribal elders*
Me, knowing next to nothing about hunting or Blackfeet traditions and customs, but still aware that You're Not Supposed To Do That: Well, shit.
The narrative: *also one of the elk was pregnant*
Me, again knowing next to nothing about hunting but I do know You're Definitely Not Supposed To Do That: So, these guys are doomed.
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curiouscanvas · 5 months
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Currently reading The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones and had to pause and try to sketch Elk Head Woman
(no spoilers please, I haven't finished the book yet)
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grimalkintoes · 7 months
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if stephen graham jones has a million fans, then i'm one of them. if stephen graham jones has one fan, then i'm THAT ONE. if stephen graham jones has no fans, that means i've died a horrific, slasher-worthy death.
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libraryspectre · 11 months
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Stephen Graham Jones's favorite character type seems to be "guy who has no idea what's going on in the face of the paranormal but that's not gonna stop him from speculating and acting, often to disastrous effect"
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literary-illuminati · 1 month
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Something very cosmically satisfying about a horror story where a weird fucked up hoofed prey animal slowly and patiently chases a human through the wilderness until they're collapsing and dying of exhaustion and exposure.
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johnfeightner · 7 months
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The Only Good Indians cover by Vincent Chong
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Have you read...
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Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.
submit a horror book!
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ethelcainlovebot · 1 year
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- The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones
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