The Only Good Indians

Brisk and thoroughly entertaining, this horror novel centers on four Native American men stalked by a vengeful spirit ten years after shooting a pregnant elk.

The pace and narrative are both extremely engaging, but the highlight for me was the characterization. The characters grapple with their ethnic identity, poverty, lifestyle choices, and feelings of obligation to and entrapment by the reservation from which they all originate. Their view of the world vividly comes across through the prose and choice in metaphors.

The only real issue I had was close to the end of the book, where an incredibly tense and bloody sequence is followed by…an extended one-on-one basketball tournament. While I understand what the author was trying to do, it wasn’t very interesting for this non-sports fan and killed much of the momentum built up during the preceding chapter. The book still has a satisfying conclusion, but the basketball stuff felt tedious and extraneous.

Overall, this book was exceptionally well done and I look forward to reading more by the author.

Bring it, Denorah says in her head, and drops another through the net. If the only good Indian is a dead one, then she's going to be the worst Indian ever.

This was a tough one to review. Do not mistake the three stars as me feeling neutral; I have strong feelings about this story, but the things I liked and the things I didn't ended up canceling out and this is where I landed.

At its core, this is a revenge story where it's hard to root for anyone involved: either the aggrieved party or the aggressors. At face value that sounds intriguing to me because I love a good moral gray area, but it didn't turn all the way over for me here. I think it was primarily the pacing that threw me off; there are scenes where things go from perfectly normal to almost comically catastrophic way too abruptly, and then a mere two or three paragraphs later we're watching a scene play out that's meant to be taking place a week later than where we just were, all without a page break. The book is also mostly in third-person limited narration until halfway through when second-person narration is introduced for a specific character. It was an interesting narrative device that grew on me towards the end once I understood why it was being used, but it was pretty jarring the first time it happened.

I'm also aware that there were almost definitely a ton of references and nuances that were zooming right over my head because this is clearly a book written by, for, and about the modern Native American experience, specifically life on a reservation in the twenty-first century. I'm a white guy on the east coast; I have no idea what that life is like, but this did make me wish I understood the culture better. For example, there was a recurring basketball motif that kept making me think, "wait, why does basketball keep coming up?," that probably makes perfect sense to others that I'm not picking up on.

That said, there were some awesome quotes like the one listed at the top that made me stop and copy them down so I wouldn't forget them. There were a few scenes where the dialogue was confusing and unnatural, like you had two characters talking past and not to each other, but the prose was solid and edited well.

I appreciate that this is a horror story that doesn't fall into the "people are the scariest monsters of all" trope because there is some honest-to-god spooky shit that goes down. I just wish the scenes with dramatic action had me gasping rather than rolling my eyes. Also, multiple dogs are killed in different scenes in this book, so if that's not you're thing I'd recommend staying away.

I loved the first half of this book, and the theme of revenge.
Years ago, four Native Americans went hunting, and their lives were forever changed.

Has revenge manifested as a supernatural being? Or perhaps the weight of living under this oppressive cloud of guilt is so heavy that it has caused paranoia to set in. The guilt has certainly become a pervasive and tangible thing. Palpable, visible. inescapable to the end, and I loved it. I enjoyed the characters. flaws and all. I enjoyed the slow build up and the ever increasing creeping fear. However at about or right before the halfway mark there was what seemed to be the climax and then instead of ending it felt almost like the start of a different book. Slower, more drawn out, even draggy in parts. Especially for people like myself who don't care a thing about basketball. I think the story line, while compelling could have flowed a little better.

I received a complimentary copy for review.