The first section of the book focuses on Lewis, who left the reservation shortly after the incident but often finds himself remembering that day. The memory of the elk slaughter sticks with each character. Violence and gore pulse through Jones’ novels, and The Only Good Indians is no exception. We spoke in mid-March and the book’s publication, originally set for April, was pushed to July because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Slashers love anniversaries,” Jones tells me over the phone from his home in Boulder. They slaughter a herd of elk, including a pregnant cow, and their actions that day haunt their memories until, on the 10th anniversary of the slaughter, they become the hunted. Before the novel begins, Lewis, Cassidy, Ricky, and Gabe go hunting on land set aside by the Blackfeet Reservation for elders. The Only Good Indians (Saga/Simon Schuster, July 14) tells the story of four friends being hunted down by an elk that might be a demon or a ghost but is definitely an angry mother. For a couple decades and a couple dozen books, novelist Stephen Graham Jones has concocted a delicious literary stew out of rare ingredients: decades of slasher flicks a deep abiding love of “losers” a relentless narrative voice that pulls the reader along at a thousand miles an hour and the experience of growing up in the American West as a member of the Blackfeet Nation.
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