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A review by lkedzie
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
5.0
I am not sure how to write this without sounding racist, so here goes: I struggled here with the writing at first, as it felt weirdly paced and somewhat inaccessible, until it clicked to me that it was structured in more as a storytelling sort of style, in particular with a sort of cadence that I associated more with cinematic portrays of American Indians than reality, that sort of measured pronouncements out of oral tradition. But whatever was going on here, once I got with it, I loved it.
The first thing that Jones does well is that he knows how to break or tease the fourth wall to great horrific effect. The second thing that Jones does well is to make the villain of the piece one of the best I have read in a while. They are scary because they operate on the logic of cosmic horror, with inhuman reasoning and an unpredictability that proves terrifying, but also within a sort of liminal space of all their actions being easily mistaken for mundane. I've read a couple books that play with the idea of racism as a sort of natural evil that acts as refuge for supernatural evil (The City We Became; Lovecraft County, et al), but none are as effective as this book. That is squarely a factor of how the author writes the bad guy.
The book is something of a composite set of stories, meant to be treated as one whole. My only complaint is that while I like the frame of the ending, and particularly how it works by taking the story in unpredictable directions, which are wholly terrifying because of it, it is much harder to put a bow on it - basically, the story reaches a point where the villainous logic that has remained intentionally outside our grasp comes close enough to it that the can see an end within that one set of logic's terms. It is within that Fridge Brilliance category where it might not click at first, but makes more sense the more you think about it, but it feels at odds with the rest of the book.
I cannot understate though how consistently and impressively scary this book is.
The first thing that Jones does well is that he knows how to break or tease the fourth wall to great horrific effect. The second thing that Jones does well is to make the villain of the piece one of the best I have read in a while. They are scary because they operate on the logic of cosmic horror, with inhuman reasoning and an unpredictability that proves terrifying, but also within a sort of liminal space of all their actions being easily mistaken for mundane. I've read a couple books that play with the idea of racism as a sort of natural evil that acts as refuge for supernatural evil (The City We Became; Lovecraft County, et al), but none are as effective as this book. That is squarely a factor of how the author writes the bad guy.
The book is something of a composite set of stories, meant to be treated as one whole. My only complaint is that while I like the frame of the ending, and particularly how it works by taking the story in unpredictable directions, which are wholly terrifying because of it, it is much harder to put a bow on it - basically, the story reaches a point where the villainous logic that has remained intentionally outside our grasp comes close enough to it that the
Spoiler
final girlI cannot understate though how consistently and impressively scary this book is.