The Only Good Indians

Lewis, Ricky, Gabe, and Cass — made a mistake ten years ago during an illegal elk hunt on tribal elders' land. They killed a cow elk and her calf in a section of the reservation reserved for the elders, and they have been carrying it since. What comes for them is the consequence of that violation — but the horror of this novel is not supernatural in origin. It is historical. Jones, a Blackfeet author, has written the most important Indigenous horror novel ever produced: a book in which the monster is the accumulated consequence of colonial dispossession that produced the conditions for every bad decision his characters have ever made, and in which Indigenous ethics — the specific moral framework of the Blackfeet Nation — is the novel's actual moral center. Stephen King called it one of the best horror novels he had read in years. The horror works because it is earned by history, and history here is not metaphor — it is the specific documented record of what was done to the land and the people on it.