Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians is a terrifying horror fantasy with supernatural elements. It is also an #OwnVoices story about modern indigenous people of North America, in this case, the Blackfeet. Most of all, though, it is a tale of friendships and entanglements, as well as the cost of made mistakes and how they can return to haunt us and hurt those we love.
This last effect is most clearly pronounced in the story of Denorah, daughter of Gabe, one of the four youths who committed the grave ill that sparked the revenge of Elk Head Woman, a villain with a wide lane for reader empathy. Denorah’s moment of test comes on a basketball court in a match with Shaney, a stranger Denorah meets after being dropped off by her mother outside the place her father is staying. Denorah is there to collect 40 dollars from her father, but nobody is home but the stranger who challenges Denorah one-on-one for a game to 21.
Jones’s scene succeeds so well because of how he mines court discourse and captures the intensity of competition, narrating their moves in fierce language that is both immediate and passionate. The story is told through the eyes of Denorah, who takes pride in her basketball, which appropriately is also a key link she has with her father. In Jones’s hands this game is an effective storytelling device, because as both players draw deeper to perform in their death match, they reveal more of their characters, especially Denorah’s courage, and finally Shaney’s real identity.
Before getting to the match, it’s instructive to consider Denorah’s perspective on the court itself: “the kind… where if you don’t slash in from the baseline for a layup, then where you come down, it’s into a rake of creosote splinters.” The backboard is “rotting-away,” and it’s “nailed flush to a tribal utility pole.” The players are not equal. Shaney is older, six inches taller. This does not bother Denorah, because at first she sees the stranger as a tall human girl, and “tall girls get trained on boxing out, on rebounding, on posting up and setting screens, using their hips and elbows. All of which a team needs to win, for sure. None of which are much use one-on-one, which is a game of slashing, of stopping and popping.”
This same level of deep study describes each play with the verve of a hoops junky. Early on, when Denorah does not know what’s on the line in the game, still playing like a normal match, Shaney moves to score on her:
Shaney dribbles once, high by her right hip, and then turns around, giving Denorah her ass, backing her down already, which is what you do when you have a size advantage.
When you’re on the wrong end of that size game, though, then you can time it out, stab an arm in, slap the ball away.
Denorah gives ground like she’s falling for this, then, the next time Shaney goes for a bounce-against, the round of her back to Denorah’s chest, Denorah steps back—pulling the chair out, Coach calls it—comes around with her right hand, reaching in for that blur of orange leather.
Except Shaney wasn’t backing her down. She was baiting the trap.
What she does now is peel around the other way, her long legs giving her what feels like an illegal first step, and by the time she’s done with that step, throwing the ball ahead of her in a dribble she’ll have to chase down, Denorah’s already out of position, can just watch.
She’s never been spun on like this.
It’s brilliant, riveting text, and it connects. You can feel the play. After a period of reflection, a time Denorah spends normalizing the game, the narration picks up again later in the game. It’s a close one, 15-15 when Denorah digs deeper and turns it on:
Denorah lets her feet leave the ground, still exploding forward under Shaney’s wingspan, and she teardrops the ball up and over, in, just enough soft touch, because this bullshit plywood backboard isn’t trustworthy, not for someone who hasn’t killed a thousand sundowns out here, the clock always ticking its last three seconds down.
“Cheap …” Shaney calls out, just generally.
Jones, at this point, gives Denorah the perception of how she is playing a game for the entire tribe, how dribbles shake the mountains, and the ball “arced up into the sky [and] merg[ed] with the sun, so that when it came down it was a comet almost, cutting through that orange circle of a rim.” Beautiful, poetic language, but its purpose is not to impress with awe but to be the source Denorah needs in her moment of desperation, that fount from which she can draw the courage to tell Shaney, “You don’t win today.”
Denorah has gone on a 3-0 streak when Shaney blocks her. Denorah, confident now, “gets the step” (because “you can always get the step, if you want it bad enough”), drives and flips the ball “up the last possible moment” but Shaney is there. “She doesn’t just slap it down, either, she smothers it, she collects it, she wraps around it like a fullback, falls hard enough back into the pole [ed: the tribal pole]… rotted wood from the backboard rains down over her.”
I mentioned nonchalantly before that this is a horror story. It is, and while Jones does gore quite well, his keenest weapon is pure psychological horror, and this plays out especially well in this scene, because at first Denorah does not know the extent of her danger. The sublime element sof the story are reminiscent of one of my favorite horror novels, King’s It, which is also at its core a story of how friends are changed by events of the past, those that linger. In the case of Jones’s four unfortunate friends, their murder of a pregnant elk ten years before persists, because the victim is not done. Denorah, to her credit, does comment on the injustice of paying for her father’s sin, but Shaney explains with chilly calm, “You’re his calf.” That this might not be a normal game of hoops is apparent in how Shaney is bleeding and her eyes aren’t right, “They’re different. They’re yellowy now, with hazel striations radiating out from the deep black hole of a pupil… too big for her face now.”
The narration of Denorah’s score of nineteen is my favorite, her “move that’ll break the heart of any defender,” as well as “the very last arrow in her quiver.” She executes with aplomb but Denorah goes too far, gets pinned under the basket, and needs to improvise, “her only hope, …to extend the ball as far from her body as possible now, around Shaney’s side where any defender would least expect it, meaning Denorah’s one-handing it now, has just enough grip to spin it up, kiss it soft off the other side of the board, and then she’s falling away, is falling for miles, back into legend.”
While this epic scene plays, however, the stakes of the game are changing. Denorah, as our eyes, picks up on the clues, and her discovery is ours, but her courage when confronted by the knowledge of an assault by an entity beyond death’s door is refreshingly unconventional. And though she sees herself fighting for her tribe, she is also fighting for all of us, everyone who believes in her just cause, and Jones guarantees that we fight beside her. We are also her tribe. It is an incredible success!
So, I read this book as part of my pre-Hugo drowning in novels of science-fiction and fantasy, figuring that the rumored supernatural elements move the story from magical realism to fantasy. It’s the same fertile ground mined by two other favorites: Rebecca Roanhorse and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Of course it has also been well-explored by others, like Ana Castillo in So Far From God, and it is limitless.
Because I take my Hugo vote way too seriously (as I do all my votes), I wanted to guarantee I didn’t miss out on some worthy story, and the book had a great buzz. The Only Good Indians deserves its reputation. It is very scary, but it also great literary fiction, developing characters well and illuminating aspects of contemporary tribal experience that are not often explored.
Nevertheless, I did not nominate it for the Hugo Award, because 2020, which was a pretty trashy year with the pandemic, delivered an unexpected number (for me) of great sff stories. These are the novels I voted for the Hugo Award out of the dozen or so I read:
- Mexican Gothic; Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- Harrow the Ninth; Tamsyn Muir
- Black Sun; Rebecca Roanhorse
- The City We Became; N.K. Jemisin
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue; V.E. Schwab
I will discuss these and others in further editions of this series.