PositiveThree Crows MagazineThe setup for The Only Good Indians , the latest novel from prolific American novelist Stephen Graham Jones, couldn’t be better. Ten years after four friends commit an illegal elk hunt – slaughtering a dozen or so elk on a snowy night five days before Thanksgiving – someone or something comes back to take revenge ... one of the engines driving the motivation is the characters’ sense of themselves as Indians. They are always obsessively going through old stories and the intricacies of bygone traditions and wondering if that was how the Indians of old did it. Even as Gabe’s daughter Denorah aspires to get out of the reservation with a basketball scholarship, she still holds herself up against the model of the elders ... As suspenseful as the narrative goes, chugging from one setpiece to another, from improvised sweat lodges to makeshift basketball courts, The Only Good Indians can’t help stumbling over tropes. The killer ultimately turns into a silent stalker, remorseless but slow and dumb in the final scenes, as the final survivor seeks a safe place to hide. As in any slasher, the last survivor stumbles on a stash of bodies, and there’s more than one back-from-the-dead surprise savior.
