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Marketing of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

I read the description of The Only Good Indians put out by Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press on Amazon last summer a few weeks before the book came out, and it hooked me into pre-ordering the book.  The paragraph, excitingly, ends with the sentence about the main characters, “Years later, they find themselves tracked by an entity bent on revenge, totally helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind to catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way”.  This rattled around in my head for the next weeks as I awaited the book’s release-- I wondered how “the entity” would be depicted: if it would be corporal or non-corporeal, humanoid or not.  

Integral to the marketing of The Only Good Indians is its author: Stephen Graham Jones.  Jones these days is as recognizable to horror fans as King, and like many genre writers, readers of horror know when opening the book to expect something in a familiar pattern to the author’s previous work.  This is very helpful to readers like me because I knew when Amazon sent me a push notification about a new release by Jones this summer that I needed to pre-order it just based on the author and the cover.  But, there is a downside to genre expectations, because, in the case of The Only Good Indians, the marketing team felt the need to specify that the horror in this novel is supernatural, which might instead have remained part of the mystery awaiting me.  

    When I was finally able to read The Only Good Indians I was confused, because the book I was reading was a psychological thriller, the central mystery of which, for me, was just how much of the “paranormal” was just the main character, Lewis, being paranoid.  He fears this himself many times, most notably in a scene on page 90, where he thinks, “Elk are just elk, simple as that.”  Now to be fair, he is also trying to convince himself that the ghost-elk-lady (he isn’t quite sure yet what it is) he’s seeing is not real, but there are many moments in the first several chapters where I felt that an element to the complex mystery in the novel had already been spoiled for me by the marketing paragraph I’d read-- like a trailer at the movies giving most of the plot.  Yes, Jones’ fans were expecting something supernatural to be possible in the plot, but this book could have had another element of mystery and horror during the suspense-building part of the book if the nagging question, of whether or not Lewis is imagining the horror, could build for us as it does for Lewis.  Too, the reveal of the entity’s true power could have held more impact if the reader remained unsure of if it had any at all.

    This complaint might seem trite, especially considering that The Only Good Indians has been receiving fantastic press and ongoing excitement on social media, but I really do value an untainted first read, and other than that paragraph my reading could well have been.  The cover of the book is pretty ambiguous as to whether the spirit exists-- it depicts a realistic deer, not a particularly supernatural-looking one.  

    There is one good thing about this reveal being a part of the marketing of the book, though, because the reveal that the entity is supernatural allows the press to market the book as an essentially Native American book.  This, too, is known by anyone reading Jones stories, but in this book, the supernatural element itself is a complicated lore that is interesting in and of itself to bring more readers to the book, whether they are casual horror readers, rabid horror fans, or even a reader just looking for a culturally interesting story.

    Also essential to the context of the marketing of this book is its release date on July 14th, 2020 during the full lockdown of the United States for the coronavirus pandemic but before the world had fully embraced hosting events online.  Jones’ press interviews by necessity were no more personal spatially than a phone interview, which could be part of the reason that the marketing decision was made to reveal this part of the book’s mystery to entice more readers in with a supernatural hook during a time when most readers had little money and a pandemic to focus on.  

#Stephen Graham Jones #The Only Good Indians #book #horror #supernatural