“The Native American Struggle for Survival in a White World”: I’m at America

magazine, reviewing… a horror novel, actually:

They thought they were lucky.

The antiheroes of Stephen Graham Jones’s revenge-horror novel, The Only Good Indians, are four Blackfeet men, childhood friends, who on the Saturday before Thanksgiving go poaching in the part of the forest set aside for tribal elders. They dub the trip the “Thanksgiving Classic,” and they are in the woods for fun, for friendship—but also out of economic need and shame. Winter is coming, and they haven’t managed to fill their freezers with big game. So they roll through the woods in the kind of broken-down truck Keith Secola would sing about. At the bottom of a cliff they spot the elk, spread out like a carpet of easy prey—and so begins a hunt that spans a decade and threatens not only their own lives, but the next generation.

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