Psychological Horror Meets Social Commentary Falls Short on Engagement
2.5 stars
Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians merges psychological horror with social commentary on the American Indian experience. When a shared past experience haunts four Blackfeet men, Jones delivers an unrelenting tale as they become the target of a sinister presence seeking revenge years later.
Horror books and I don't typically get along well — they too often veer into a story that borders on being boring or silly. While I never quite got to the point of the latter, I did find myself less than thrilled with the majority of the book. Despite the attempt at intensity or tension and the fact that clearly lives were in danger, somehow this only ever felt very low stakes and I seriously struggled to stay engaged. The present tense narrative wasn't so bad here (which is saying something, actually), but pairing that with an incredibly casual and laid-back tone only added to that feeling of apathy. (Why would the narrative make a really obvious and clearly intentional grammatical error, rather than in the dialogue alone?) I actually could see this working better for me as part of a short story collection.
I will say, the story itself picked up in the second half of the book — before that the pacing was that of a snail. Regardless, there was a definite lack of connection. This is something I commonly find in horror books (and movies), where they seemingly rely on the shocking events to do the heavy lifting of dealing out multi-dimensional, relatable characters — I assume where the reader can more easily put themselves in the given scenario, rather than how I read it with the given characters experiencing it sans reader participation.
Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians merges psychological horror with social commentary on the American Indian experience. When a shared past experience haunts four Blackfeet men, Jones delivers an unrelenting tale as they become the target of a sinister presence seeking revenge years later.
Horror books and I don't typically get along well — they too often veer into a story that borders on being boring or silly. While I never quite got to the point of the latter, I did find myself less than thrilled with the majority of the book. Despite the attempt at intensity or tension and the fact that clearly lives were in danger, somehow this only ever felt very low stakes and I seriously struggled to stay engaged. The present tense narrative wasn't so bad here (which is saying something, actually), but pairing that with an incredibly casual and laid-back tone only added to that feeling of apathy. (Why would the narrative make a really obvious and clearly intentional grammatical error, rather than in the dialogue alone?) I actually could see this working better for me as part of a short story collection.
I will say, the story itself picked up in the second half of the book — before that the pacing was that of a snail. Regardless, there was a definite lack of connection. This is something I commonly find in horror books (and movies), where they seemingly rely on the shocking events to do the heavy lifting of dealing out multi-dimensional, relatable characters — I assume where the reader can more easily put themselves in the given scenario, rather than how I read it with the given characters experiencing it sans reader participation.