Perhaps this is why Jones repeatedly brings readers back to these places and homelands, to sites where bones and bullets still lay scattered over the land, where the spirits of animals and humans alike dwell and memories still haunt. The events of Palo Duro, Texas, in 1874, featured in Growing Up Dead in Texas, and at the Marias River on a January morning in 1870, a key historical reference in Ledfeather and The Only Good Indians, are only two among the hundreds of vicious attacks perpetrated against native peoples which continue to live in native stories and memory even though they remain unknown to most Americans. However, he also transports readers to the sites of horrific massacres that irrevocably altered native worlds. Like previous offerings, including Demon Theory, All the Beautiful Sinners, Mongrels, and Mapping the Interior, this story is set primarily in places dear to Jones’s heart - in and around the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. The anticipation and dread Jones’s stories provoke are amplified in his unique take on the slasher by associations with holidays such as Thanksgiving and Columbus Day, presented with their colonial entanglements so that the arrival of Columbus in 1492 is not seen as an occasion for historical celebration but “a storm so bad it eats the world.” Yet, whatever form the monstrous takes in Jones’s work, he is a master at creating a storied presence that settles deep into our psyches.Īlthough much of Jones’s previous fiction is set in the American West, The Only Good Indians - like his boldest experiments in weird fiction - transcends borders and temporal dimensions or, more appropriately, creates its own.

It joins a quickly expanding body of work that makes readers recoil at what may be hiding out there in the shadows, watching from the edge of the forest, lying in wait beneath the floorboards, lurking beyond the next turn in the road, or haunting the voided spaces of colonial history. His enthusiasm for such storytelling is on display in his recent full-length novel, The Only Good Indians (2020), the winner of a Bram Stoker Award and Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction. For Jones, a writer who also teaches courses on these figures, it seems that every day is, indeed, Halloween. EQUALLY ADEPT WITH literary and historical fiction, Stephen Graham Jones is also acclaimed for tales of dark fantasy and horror suffused with slashers, monsters, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, and other creatures that go bump in the night.

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