The Only Good Indians

Ten years ago, four young Blackfeet men drove into the section of the reservation reserved for the elders and shot into a winter elk herd, and one of them, Lewis, put down a young cow who would not die, and found her calf. The hunt was illegal on that land, and the game warden caught them at it; the herd's price comes due a decade later, and the novel is that collection.

Jones runs the reckoning as four movements. Ricky dies first, outside a North Dakota bar, in what the papers call an accident with an elk. Lewis, in Great Falls with a white wife, a good job and the assimilation guilt the book anatomizes brilliantly, starts seeing a young woman with an elk's head in his living room, and his unraveling, the novel's long central panel, is a masterpiece of paranoia in which the reader loses the line between haunting and breakdown exactly when he does. Then the entity, Elk Head Woman, walks into the reservation lives of Gabe and Cass, and the finale becomes something no reader forecasts: a sweat lodge gone wrong, a slaughter, and then a one on one basketball game, the spirit against Denorah, Gabe's teenage daughter, a final girl duel played on a rez court for every remaining life.

The horror runs on specificity, postal routes, per capita checks, basketball, the exact texture of Blackfeet life rendered from inside, and the revenge is the land's own logic: the hunt broken open, the debt walking.

Around three hundred and twenty pages.

Best for readers who want the slasher structure handed to a spirit with a grievance, and the novel that made Indigenous horror the genre's center of gravity.