The Only Good Indian by Stephen Graham Jones

Jones recreates the way our minds work, the way we believe all the terrifying things we would never give voice to because they are too outrageous or too silly, but that which we KNOW in our bones to be absolutely irrefutable. It’s a tightrope walk, and we are never more vertiginously vulnerable than when we do open up and spill those thoughts to another person. Add to that the restrictive nature of toxic masculinity (a term I don’t normally use but which is usefully evocative here), and it’s a fascinating mix.

This story starts slow and builds. The reader hitchhikes into the mind of Lewis. Initially, he seems deranged, seeing things that aren’t there, worrying an incident from years before until he changes the shape of it to fit his paranoia. But then the story takes off at a gallop, and the second half of the novel is a breakneck ride. The conceit is out there, but all that front loading succeeds in making you accept its plausibility. It is true horror, dropping bombs of violence that are all the more visceral for their casual nature. I found myself rereading passages, thinking that maybe I misunderstood the breathless accounts of extreme and dehumanizing carnage, only to realize that the acts had indeed occurred on the page and that I did not want to revisit them. And those gory scenes raise the question of what it means to be a human, to inhabit the natural world while holding oneself apart from it all, above all the blood, bone, and tissue. Whatever answer you arrive at when you read this novel, there is no shortage of evidence to sift through in these crime scenes.

Gallery, Pocket Books, Publication Date 7/14/20