The First Half of A Book Review: "The Only Good Indians" by Stephen Graham Jones
Ascents too long in the making, Ghost stories
I have been waiting a long time for Stephen Graham Jones to break out of cult concern. Of all the notable writers of horror to emerge in the ‘00s, he was the one who seemed, to me, most apt as a spiritual heir to King. Beyond being as bewilderingly prolific, if not moreso, he possesses both the perceptions of class and vernacular character that many discerning readers find appealing about King’s work.
His reverence for the many facets of horror is as deep and unpretentious as King’s. A story like “Broken Record” (from Ellen Datlow’s The Devil and the Deep anthology) displays his mastery of horror’s essential mechanics, such that he can knowingly, cannily break them in order to rebuild them into better, bloodier shapes. The cadence of his prose is warm and approachable and possessed of a dry wit. He is as much a total package as anyone can be, the sort of name that ought to be at the head of the zeitgeist where popular horror is concerned.
The sense that I get is that The Only Good Indians (TOGI), his most recent novel, will mark his arrival on a larger stage. At this point, it is half hope; but Jones has been in high gear for years, churning out stories and novels and novellas (alongside TOGI, Jones will be releasing two unconnected novellas in 2020) of consistently sterling quality. Having reached the halfway point of the novel, it has (so far) continued his hot streak.
Without giving too much away, TOGI finds four friends, once close, now distant and dispersed, who find themselves under threat connected to, naturally, one shared mistake. A comparison to TOGI I’ve heard bandied about is Peter Straub’s 1970’s doorstopper Ghost Story, which makes a lot of sense when you look at their respective shapes: Both novels concern a group of friends marked by shared experience and a supernatural force primed for reckoning. But Jones’s is the better novel in almost every respect. It is not as capacious as Straub’s meandering New England milieu, but it is both more focused and more ambitious - it does more with its central themes of memory and responsibility.
Both Straub and Jones understand haunting as an inherently moralistic mechanism. That is to say, a ghost or spirit can function as a universal witness holding actors, otherwise shielded by secrecy, to account. This allows for both vicarious pleasure in retribution and the interrogation of retribution-as-justice.
Straub was not terribly interested in interrogation, nor did Ghost Story’s seminal crime of repressed teen horniness (provoked by the horror of unbridled female sexuality) ultimately support anything interesting.Jones, by contrast, has a firm grasp on what he’s working with.
The structure is somewhat odd, but clearly intentional. Jones has spoken of the novel as essentially a series of conjoined novellas, each taking up a different tack of horror - haunted house, slasher, etc. As a result, the novel focuses on a single given protagonist for long stretches. The prologue has one character, the first third of the book another, before incorporating the larger group.
This feels very strange and unexpected for a novel with an ensemble cast - a writer like King or Straub, with this many characters, would cycle through character perspectives from chapter to chapter, weaving narrative strands together to emphasize that they are in the same story, together. But even as the second half of TOGI opens up structurally and begins to juggle perspectives, the characters feel isolated from one another even as they are proximally close, thinking of each other distractedly if at all, and with little regard, focused as they are on their own quotidian problems.
This is, I think, where Jones’s literary ambition* comes through most forcefully. That which spurs the characters to make their fateful mistake is alienation along several interconnected axes - the characters’ insecurity as young men, as young men in their particular cultural context (about which I have no valuable or germane insights**), is the animating force behind their actions in marvelously and humanely believable ways. The question of what makes a “good Indian” recurs throughout. Their crime is itself born in contradiction; they arrive at their trespass in large part because they are internally alienated from claiming their heritage, going where they know they shouldn’t be. But their crime is committed explicitly in the name of finding a way to forcefully claim that heritage. Thus everything in the novel is sourced in disconnection, in un-togetherness, and in this way, the disconnected feeling of the novel’s structure, the isolation of character perspective chapters, is consonant with the themes of the actual prose itself.
I could see this choice alienating readers. Even with Jones’s dry wit and insight on full display, there is a loneliness to the novel. And as it passes from its first form into its second and opens up, as the antagonistic spirit (who is, crucially, not suggested to be evil) becomes a character, it begins to interrogate retribution-as-justice. The spirit’s thirst for vengeance is palpable, the crime against it not justified by misunderstanding or carelessness, and yet we are brought to know these men beyond the lens of their crime, and the innocent around them are caught in the violent crossfire. In this way the novel begins to take on the ominous shape of grand tragedy.
There’s more here - I need to process how much I don’t love basketball, or sports in novels generally - but there’s still a lot more novel to be read. I’m told it sticks the landing, and I’m excited / dreading to see if it does.
* Of course one can, and many have, take issue with the necessity or merit of the “literary” in horror as an industry concept, but in my view what is “literary” necessarily moves on the level of subtext, and it’s actually quite difficult to avoid writing subtext into fiction, even when purposefully avoiding it; true, pornographic “just the scares ma’am” horror, if it exists, has to be rare.
** SPOILER: The one thing I will say is that while it isn’t explicitly mentioned, the trespass they commit seems an intentional echo of white settlers’ decimation of the North American bison. Repeating guns and the incursion of railways into wildlands both figure, and both were integral to the massacre of bison. I can only assume it’s intentional.