Saga/Simon & Schuster, 2020

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REVIEW BY THEODORE C. VAN ALST, JR.

Gabe’s dad looks out the kitchen window, at the wall of the house right beside his, maybe.

Who knows what old men look at?

—Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

When it comes to reading, anyway, what do we, old men or not, look at? The words we read, the images they evoke? Cover art, name, title?

Or ourselves, like the best art asks us to?

Stephen Graham Jones always asks, subtly demands, and ultimately forces us to engage with all of the above along with the not-so-casual why of why we read at all.

For scholars of Native lit (whatever that category may be, or ever have been), a new offering from Jones presents two possibilities, both usually inhabiting the horror category (and increasingly the genre). The first; what terrors await us as readers and teachers of his work that always pushes and stretches our intellectual abilities and classroom boundaries, the second; as Native scholars of lit, well, it’s only having to examine the boundaries of what we do and who we are.

Jones’s notoriously difficult and elastic experimental work in texts such as The Fast Red Road and The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto present their own academic challenges in the field, but his own essays and thoughts on being a writer (“Why I Write,” 7 Things I’ve Learned So Far,” “The H Word: What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror Endings”), and being a Native writer (e.g. the oft-cited multiply-published “Letter to a Just Starting-Out Indian Writer, and Maybe to Myself,” first heard at the Native American Literary Symposium in 2015) make us do the real work.

On one level, Jones’s latest, The Only Good Indians, makes a similar in structure but different in move via tone that I found in my first reading of Silko’s Ceremony. In the 1986 Penguin paperback version, the “Note on Bear People and Witches” appears on page 131, exactly halfway through the book. While I may have noted it as a postmodern turn at the moment, it was nonetheless the moment in which the text rolled from a self-conscious exercise in projected classroom teaching to the vibrant, layered storytelling masterpiece I hoped it would be. Though not quite at halftime, the moment in which The Only Good Indians moves from a story I found myself describing in a note as a work that “reads a thousand years old and not-born for even more, while it lives today with each next word. The first segment was a hundred grocery store paperbacks comfortable, that best voice to hear, so I should have known it wouldn’t, couldn’t last,” to an expectedly unexpected slow inferno in a Jones work is demarcated in post-postmodern (I’ll go with “neocosmic” [new world] for lack of a better term as to what debatable literary/theoretical moment we find ourselves currently inhabiting) fashion by the author himself: “It’s a line between who Lewis used to be and who he is now.”

It’s been a minute since Jones published anything with an identifiable “Indianness” in its title (of course in the week or so since I started writing this he’s published Attack of the 50 Foot Indian in typical Jones prodigious fashion), and though I am not making the argument that doing so now marks a departure from his commitments to “Indianness” everywhere and nowhere, The Only Good Indians marks a broad Big 5 (soon to be Big 4, I assume) release, and through no fault of the author picks up the requisite looking-for-an-Indian-in-this-cupboard mainstream boosts along the way. According to Saga Publishing, Jones is “The Jordan Peele of Horror Literature,” and in his latest, “The creeping horror of Joe Hill meets Tommy Orange’s There There in this dark novel of revenge told in Stephen’s unique voice.”

Puns and jokes sing throughout the work, from protagonist Lewis Clark to “The Last Finals Girl.” Jones gives Native folks some much-appreciated inside Crow jokes to go along with almost every Native kid’s school experience: “Is this really Indian, D? Shouldn’t you do something to honor your heritage?” (129). Challenges like that can unwittingly escalate to unmooredness, to the cultural vertigo Jones deals with in showing the shame and awkwardness of disconnectedness, telling us “Lewis never built the sweat he wanted, but if he stands in the upstairs shower long enough that it’s all steam, he can pretend, can’t he?” (105).The fear of ill-defined identity is as nerve-wracking as the inexorable approach of hulking monsters. The Only Good Indians examines the trauma of place, of leaving the reservation, and also how those who stayed behind are really never that far away.

The physical sense of immersion is equal to the mental depth provided by Jones. The deep cold of the northern plains and mountains is palpable, leaving us wanting a blanket against the chill as much as we want it to fight the terrors that waltz under the bluewhite iciness of black Montana nights. And when we think we couldn’t possible feel more alone under those clear hard stars, he switches to 2^nd person narration for Elk Head Woman, leaving us utterly lost in the snow. This masterful melding of cultural specificity that translates to universal horror is the neocosmic approach of The Only Good Indians, a much-awaited offering which thoroughly delivers on Entertainment Weekly’s declaration that it’s “One of 2020’s Buzziest Horror Novels.”  It marks, intended or not, the departure of Jones into the broader mainstream, with, for the field of Native literature, a guideline over Jones’s always-generous shoulder, bringing so many of us along with him while reassuring the good doctor, as if he needed it, that we’re with him, still connected, looking forward to the worlds he’s heading into.

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THEODORE C. VAN ALST JR. is Associate Professor and Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Montana. He is a former Assistant Dean and Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University, and has been an Assistant Professor and Co-Chair of the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His most recent work includes “Lapin Noir: To Del Rio It Went” in A Critical Companion to the Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones, ed. Billy J. Stratton from the University of New Mexico Press as well as the chapters “Navajo Joe,” and “The Savage Innocents,” in Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film (2013), available from Michigan State University Press. His current book-length project is Spaghetti and Sauerkraut with a Side of Frybread, and his edited volume The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones was released in April 2015 by the University of New Mexico Press, who are also publishing a collection of his short stories in 2018. His fiction and photography have been published in Entropy, The Rumpus, Indian Country Today, The Raven Chronicles, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others. He has worked as a consultant on multiple projects for the Disney Channel as well as on NPR’s All Things Considered, and has recently appeared in multiple segments of the History Channel series Mankind the Story of All of Us. He has been interviewed by The Washington Post, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Native America Calling, Smithsonian Magazine, and Al-Jazeera America Television on a variety of subjects, from Native representation and Tonto to Spaghetti Westerns, headdresses, and Twilight.