"Four Native American friends
went hunting one night on land that was reserved for tribe elders. It was dark
and snow had started falling, but they found a herd of elk at the bottom of a
hill. Bullets rained. Large bodies dropped. One refused to die. Lewis, one of
the men, had to work hard at killing the beast, shooting it more than once.
After the mayhem, nine carcasses littered the ground, the snow falling steadily
on them. The friends celebrated and began field dressing the elk — that meat
would keep their freezers full all winter. But the animal Lewis struggled to
kill was pregnant, the calf inside it still alive. Then they got caught by the
law and had to throw away the meat. Almost a decade later, what happened that
night still haunts them. Lewis is literally haunted, by something that appears
as a woman holding an elk's head. It killed his dog. He has to destroy it
before he becomes the next victim, but killing something you already killed
once is hard.”
Not to sit on the fence here,
but I found The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones to be a very complex
tale that I liked and hated –sometimes at the same time. While it has a completely
inventive characters and setting, and something unique in the horror genre we
rarely see -Native American representation, I found the pacing to be glacial
and Jones' prose something I never really grasped. At its core, though, it's ghost
story of revenge, same as say Peter Straub’s 1980 masterpiece Ghost Story,
which carried the same idea, but I never felt the book was creepy scary enough. Never felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There are some thrills, but the final set piece is silly and will look sillier
if anyone adapts the book for TV or movie.
So I liked the book for being different, something a lot of reader’s sometime struggle with –trying untested writers. And would recommend it, but in the end, the books progress and the literary devices the author foists on said reader are distracting.
No comments:
Post a Comment