It’s a great play on the idea of self-sabotage, and how close we all are to losing our minds on any given day, and as it plays out there are more than a few great shocks and bile-swallowing descriptions.Īs stated earlier, one of the engines driving the motivation is the characters’ sense of themselves as Indians. The elk-spirit, seeking revenge, is canny and remorseless, setting up circumstances for the characters to drive themselves, and their loved ones, to murder or worse.
The novel’s best parts are watching Lewis and the three remaining leads drive themselves into a state of paranoia. The avenging spirit, an elk from the hunt, then moves on to Lewis. Grabbing a wrench to save the day, he is surprised when the elk disappears, leaving the stunned truckers to find a drunk Indian with a wrench amidst the wreckage of their gear. In a tight prologue, Ricky is on his way to a job in Minneapolis when he gets drunk in a truck stop and sees a massive elk destroying trucks in the parking lot.
‘One little two little, three little natives’ doesn’t have the same sound to it, as one of them observes. Raised on a Blackfeet reservation, the four are pureblood Native Americans or, as they prefer, Indians. The four friends – Lewis, Gabe, Cass, and Ricky, have long since gone their separate ways, but the events of that night continue to bind them in ways beyond that of their shared heritage. Ten years after four friends commit an illegal elk hunt – slaughtering a dozen or so elk on a snowy night five days before Thanksgiving – someone or something comes back to take revenge. The setup for The Only Good Indians, the latest novel from prolific American novelist Stephen Graham Jones, couldn’t be better.
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