Denorah Cross Guns is at the line in the driveway, running her routine: the same dribbles, the same breath, the same bend of the knees, every time. Her father cannot watch her play in the gym, because a court order keeps him away from home games, so he has parked his truck at the curb with a beer and started betting her money on every shot. She makes one. He raises the stakes. Between attempts she rehearses the ugly things opposing crowds will chant at a Blackfeet girl from Browning, so they will not surprise her in a real game. And behind her father, unseen by him, a head of long black hair is rising slowly out of the bed of his pickup. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones spends a long time getting to that driveway, and once it arrives there it becomes something far braver than a revenge story.
A Girl Who Counts Her Shots
The setup is simple and old. Ten years earlier, four young Blackfeet men poached a herd of elk in a stretch of land kept back for tribal elders, were caught by the game warden and banned from hunting for good. One of the animals was a young cow who did not go quietly. Now, one by one, something is coming for the men, and for whatever they have come to love since.
Denorah is the novel’s argument with that premise. She was a toddler on the day of the hunt. She knows the story only as rez gossip, the kind classmates repeat to each other and teachers pretend not to hear. In the sixth grade she drew a picture in the style of old Plains ledger art, the drawings warriors made in the margins of account books, and got a middling grade from a teacher who doubted it was Indian enough. That small humiliation tells the reader more about her world than any amount of exposition. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is strongest whenever it stays with her: her flat refusal to be impressed by adults, her fierce love for a father who keeps letting her down, her sense of the basketball court as the one place where the rules are fair.
The Elk Gets to Talk
The formal risk that pays off most is the narration. In the middle stretch the creature’s chapters address the reader as “you”, so that the person holding the book is the one standing in the dark at the edge of the yard, watching the men, counting them. The shift is unsettling in the best way. The reader is put in the hunter’s position, the novel’s quiet reversal of everything that happened on that hillside a decade before. The creature remembers a train that once pinned her kind against the rifles, generations back, and the town dogs know her for what she is the moment she walks past. Her grief is not human, and the novel never pretends it is, but it is real.
That middle stretch is built around a sweat. A tribal police officer pays one of the old friends to run one for his teenage son, who is grieving a friend killed in a car that went into a creek. The lodge is cobbled together from dog bedding over a child’s tent frame, the water ladled with a feed scoop, powwow songs drifting from the cruiser’s loudspeaker. It is funny and makeshift and sincere all at once, and it is exactly how Jones treats reservation life throughout: never as a museum, always as a place where people improvise with what they have. The lodge is also, the men tell each other, the one place nothing ever attacks. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones lets that sentence hang over the next fifty pages like a weather warning.
What Only Good Indians Asks of Its Men
The men themselves are drawn with real affection and no excuses. Gabe, Denorah’s father, is a poacher, a drinker and a charmer whose pride in his daughter is the best thing about him and nowhere near enough. Cassidy has gone straight for a Crow woman named Jo and is hiding a ring in a dead truck in his yard. The reader likes both of them, which is precisely what makes The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones so punishing. Their banter in the lodge, the old routines and running jokes of men who have known each other since they were boys, is some of the best dialogue in the novel, and it is there to be taken away.
The opening section, in Great Falls with Lewis, the friend who left the reservation, is the novel’s most divisive stretch. It is psychologically acute, a portrait of a man reasoning himself into catastrophe step by careful step, but its violence is so extreme and so lingering that some readers will close the book before the story moves north. The gore is never pointless, yet there is more of it than the argument needs, and the later sections land harder because they hold back.
The creature’s rules are the other soft spot. How she moves between shapes, why she borrows the faces she borrows and what she can and cannot do are left loose enough that a few of the climaxes feel arranged rather than earned. In a novel so precise about everything else, from knife edges to free-throw mechanics, that vagueness stands out.
About Those Only Good Indians
The title takes a slur everyone in the book has heard and dares the reader to hear it again. Every character is pressed on the question of what kind of Indian he or she is meant to be: the kind who hunts for the elders, the kind who leaves, the kind who turns up as a statistic in a pamphlet. Denorah’s answer, given at a moment when the whole book bends toward her, is the most satisfying ending a horror novel has offered in some time. Jones is Blackfeet himself, and the confidence of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones shows on every page. There is no explaining, no softening for outsiders, only a community written from the inside, sharp jokes and all. The awards shelf followed, including the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson prizes for the year’s best novel.
Readers should know the novel contains graphic killing of people and animals, the danger and death of young people, suicide, addiction and racist abuse, handled without flinching. The final pages switch to a storyteller’s voice, framing what happened as legend for children, and it is the one place where The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones tells the reader how to feel instead of trusting the scene before it.
Final Thoughts
For all its blood, this is a book about inheritance: what parents hand down without meaning to, and whether a child can refuse it. The sequel, Off the Reservation, returns to the same world, but this first book closes cleanly on its own.
Anyone who finishes The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones wanting more of the author’s Blackfeet history should go next to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, which reaches back to the massacres of the nineteenth century. Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice makes a quieter, colder companion, an Anishinaabe community holding together through a long winter when the world outside goes dark.
The elk walk in straight lines, the book says. So, in the end, does the girl.