I like Stephen Graham Jones's work because he gets some things about writing really really right.
For horror, buildup and tension are key, and these elements in The Only Good Indians are executed incredibly. It's not like I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, but no scene really dragged for me. It was plain old well-paced.
With that done right, there's the writing itself, and Jones's prose is stylistic and expert. I'm the sort of reader who obsesses over a well-crafted run-on sentence, and this one (an early passage) is just, so good:
"Ricky remembered that the boy selected to drape a calf robe over his shoulders and run out in front of all those buffalo, he’d been the one to win all the races the elders had put him and all the other kids in, and he’d been the one to climb all the trees the best, because you needed to be fast to run ahead of all those tons of meat, and you needed good hands to, at the last moment after sailing off the cliff, grab onto the rope the men had already left there, that would tuck you up under, safe."
The repetition, that natural flow of it, and it ending on a sudden sort of tender note-- "tuck you up under, safe."--I just love this sort of writing. It adds so much depth to a book like this, makes it special. At least it did for me. This is one of my favorite 2020 reads so far.
For horror, buildup and tension are key, and these elements in The Only Good Indians are executed incredibly. It's not like I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, but no scene really dragged for me. It was plain old well-paced.
With that done right, there's the writing itself, and Jones's prose is stylistic and expert. I'm the sort of reader who obsesses over a well-crafted run-on sentence, and this one (an early passage) is just, so good:
"Ricky remembered that the boy selected to drape a calf robe over his shoulders and run out in front of all those buffalo, he’d been the one to win all the races the elders had put him and all the other kids in, and he’d been the one to climb all the trees the best, because you needed to be fast to run ahead of all those tons of meat, and you needed good hands to, at the last moment after sailing off the cliff, grab onto the rope the men had already left there, that would tuck you up under, safe."
The repetition, that natural flow of it, and it ending on a sudden sort of tender note-- "tuck you up under, safe."--I just love this sort of writing. It adds so much depth to a book like this, makes it special. At least it did for me. This is one of my favorite 2020 reads so far.