The Only Good Indians

The Only Good Indians is a revenge story in which the avenger is in the right, and Jones spends four hundred pages refusing to make that comfortable for anybody.

The crime is specific and small. Ricky, Lewis, Gabe and Cassidy were young, it was the end of the season, they had nothing, and they drove into the Blackfeet Nation's elders-only hunting ground and emptied their rifles into a herd. They killed far more than they could carry, took a fraction of it, and left the rest. One of the animals was a pregnant cow that Lewis finished himself and butchered, and what was inside her is what the rest of the book is about.

Jones structures it as four movements with four protagonists, each one a different kind of horror novel. Ricky's section is a prologue and a bar fight in North Dakota. Lewis's is the longest and the best: a domestic unravelling in Great Falls, in which a man who has left the reservation, married a white woman and taken a job at the post office begins seeing an elk in his living room, and the reader cannot tell for a hundred pages whether this is a haunting or a breakdown. Gabe and Cassidy's section is a slasher with a sweat lodge in it. Denorah's is a chase.

Lewis's section is one of the best things in modern horror

It works because Jones makes the ambiguity load-bearing. Lewis's reasoning deteriorates in a way that is entirely explicable — guilt, isolation, a marriage he does not trust, a co-worker he fixates on — and the novel lets him act on it catastrophically before confirming that the supernatural element was real all along. He is not wrong that something is hunting him. He is wrong about everything else, and what he does on the strength of being wrong is the hinge of the whole book.

The voice is the reason it is not a message novel

Jones writes in a close, fast, funny, profane free indirect style that stays absolutely inside each character's head. The novel is full of basketball, dogs, trucks, bad jobs, cheap beer and jokes, and the Blackfeet reservation is written from inside rather than described. The title is the back half of a nineteenth-century line attributed to a US general, and the novel never explains it, because it does not need to.

Where it is uneven

The middle sections are structurally repetitive — three men, three similar approaches — and the sweat-lodge massacre goes on longer than it needs to. Elk Head Woman's rules shift between sections. And the final chase, while the best-paced thing in the book, resolves a cosmology that the preceding three hundred pages had kept deliberately unstable.

For the same unflinching physical cruelty in prose, The Girl Next Door; for the same inherited debt arriving a generation late, The Elementals; for the same colonial reading of who is permitted to be prey, Tender Is the Flesh.

The short answer: Elk Head Woman kills three of the four men. Ricky Boss Ribs dies outside a bar in North Dakota in the prologue. Lewis, convinced that his co-worker Shaney is the entity, kills his dog, then his wife Peta, then Shaney — and is shot by police, having murdered two innocent people on the basis of a correct premise and a wrong identification. Gabe Cross Guns and Cassidy Sees Elk die in the sweat lodge and the killing ground around Gabe's trailer, in the novel's most extended sequence of violence. Then Elk Head Woman goes after the last of the line: Denorah Cross Guns, Gabe's teenage daughter, a basketball player good enough to be leaving the reservation on a scholarship. The final movement is a chase across the reservation on foot, and Denorah survives it. She survives because she is faster, because she keeps thinking, and because of what she offers at the end: she does not kill the entity and she is not rescued from it. She wins on the ground she is best on, and Elk Head Woman — who has by then taken everyone she came for — lets her go. The novel ends with Denorah alive, the debt collected, and the clear understanding that nothing about any of it has been just.

What is Elk Head Woman?

The elk Lewis shot and butchered, returned — the pregnant cow whose calf he cut out of her, come back in a form that is part woman and part elk and bound by rules the novel does not fully state. She is not a ghost and not a monster in the genre's sense: she is a mother collecting for a child, and the book's position is that her grievance is exact and her methods are not proportionate. She can take human appearance, she can be seen by some people and not others, and what she wants is the four men and their line.

Who dies in The Only Good Indians?

Ricky, in the prologue, outside a bar. Lewis, shot by police after killing his dog, his wife Peta and his colleague Shaney. Gabe and Cassidy, at the sweat lodge and trailer. Several bystanders, including two women who had nothing to do with the hunt — which is the novel's hardest material, because they are killed by Lewis rather than by the entity. Denorah survives. The body count includes people whose only connection to the original crime is proximity.

Why does Lewis kill his wife?

Because he has correctly concluded that something is hunting him and incorrectly concluded that it is wearing a particular person. The novel tracks his reasoning closely enough that the reader can see each inference and see that each one is defensible on its own. Peta's death is the worst thing in the book and Jones gives it no mitigation: Lewis is right about the haunting and he murders two innocent women because of it, and the supernatural being real does not reduce what he did by anything.

How does Denorah survive?

By running, and by being better than the entity at the one thing she is best at. Elk Head Woman hunts her across open country and Denorah keeps moving, keeps thinking and does not panic, and the confrontation ends with her alive by her own effort rather than by intervention. Jones gives her the novel's only competence that is not retrospective — she is a basketball player, she understands pace, and she treats the chase as a game she can play.

What does the title mean?

It is the back half of the line "the only good Indian is a dead Indian," attributed to the US general Philip Sheridan in the nineteenth century and repeated widely afterwards as policy and as a joke. Jones leaves it unglossed in the novel. The title's function is to put the genocidal frame on the book before it starts, so that a revenge story about four men who shot too many elk is read inside a much longer accounting.

Is The Only Good Indians a slasher?

In two of its four movements, deliberately and knowledgeably. Jones is an extremely well-read slasher critic and the Gabe and Cassidy section is built on the form's conventions — the isolated location, the escalating kills, the final girl — and Denorah is explicitly nicknamed Finals Girl for her basketball before the novel makes the other meaning available. The Lewis section is not a slasher at all, which is why the book works.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Era bias 090 reads modern — 96 works score lower. A 2020 novel of post-office shifts, group chats, pickup trucks, basketball and reservation life now.

Viscera 074 is high — 87 works score lower. An elk butchered in detail, a dog killed, several people opened, an extended massacre at a sweat lodge, and injuries described with real anatomical specificity.

Tone 020 is bleak — 54 works score lower. Three of the four men die, two innocent women are murdered by one of them, and the one survivor's reward is having outrun it.

The threat at 042 is just under the midpoint, which is the correct reading: the entity is not human, and the worst killings in the book are committed by a man.

Pace 046 is just under the midpoint — 65 works are slower. Lewis's section is a slow unravelling; the last two movements are fast.

Reality anchor 048 is just under the midpoint. The reservation and Great Falls are rendered literally, and the entity's rules are never stated.

On shocks: several, and the best of them is an elk standing in a living room.