Tumgik
#Stephen Graham Jones
Text
This year some of my favourite books I read were written by indigenous American authors and I just wanted to shout out a couple that I fell in love with
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
Horror being my second most read genre, I did not think books could still get under my skin the way this one did lol. It follows four Blackfoot men who are seemingly being hunted by a vengeful... something... years after a fateful hunting trip that happened just before they went their separate ways. The horror, the dread, the something... pure nightmare fuel 10/10
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
An apocalyptic novel following an isolated Anishinaabe community in the far north who lose contact with the outside world. When two of their young men return from their college with dire news, they set about planning on how to survive the winter, but when outsiders follow, lines are drawn in the community that might doom them all. This book is all dread all the time, the use of dreams and the inevitability of conflict weighs heavy til the very end. An excellent apocalypse story if you're into that kind of thing.
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
This book follows Jade, a deeply troubled mixed race teenager with a shitty homelife who's *obsessed* with slasher movies. When she finds evidence that there's a killer running about her soon-to-be gentrified small town, she weaponises that knowledge to predict what's going to happen next. I don't think this book will work for most people, it's a little stream of consciousness, Jade's head is frequently a very difficult place to be in, but by the last page I had so much love for her as a character and the emotional rollercoaster she's on that I had to mention it here.
Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
Taking a bit of a left turn but this charming YA murder mystery really stuck with me this year. Elatsoe is a teenage girl living in an America where myths, monsters, and magic are all real every day occurrences. When her cousin dies mysteriously with no witnesses, she decides to do whatever she can, including using her ability to raise the spirits of dead animals, to solve the case. The worldbuilding was just really fun in this one, but the Native American myths and influence were the shining star for me, and the asexual rep was refreshing to see in a YA book too tbh
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
The audiobook, the audiobook, the audiobook!!!! Also the physical book because formatting and illustrations, but the audiobook!!! Tanya Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer, and this novel is a genre blending of 20 years worth of the authors journal entries, poetry, and short stories, that culminates in a truly unique story about a young girl surviving her teenage years in a small tundra town in the 70s. It is sad and beautiful and hard but an experience like nothing else I read this year.
6K notes · View notes
bitterkarella · 6 months
Text
Midnight Pals: Final Girl
Stephen Graham Jones: Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this the tale of the girl who’s obsessed with slashers Jones: there’s this girl who just constantly talks about slashers Barker: oh that sounds really annoying Jones: Barker: like that sounds SO annoying
Jones: so one day she thinks she might be in the middle of her own slasher movie Jones: and she thinks oh shit this rules Jones: people are just gonna get murdered left and right Jones: this fucking rocks
King: so why’s she think she’s in a slasher movie? is there a killer on the loose? Jones: oh it’s cuz this hot virginal girl moves into town King: King: wait so not because anyone gets murdered? Jones: no just cuz this hot girl moves in Jones: i mean that’s usually the first indication that a slasher is around right? King: to be honest, it’s not usually the first thing I’d think of Poe: yeah that could indicate a lot of different things
Jones: so this hot but very pure girl moves into town King: and somehow that makes the slasher-obsessed girl think that she’s in a slasher movie come to life? King: but why would tha- Joss Whedon: [shrieking] SHE’S THE FINAL GIRL!!! Whedon: LET ME TELL THE STORY! Whedon: I KNOW ALL THE TROPES!
Jones: see, this girl knows the rules of a slasher movie Jones: so she knows how to- Joss Whedon: OH! OH!!! Whedon: OH!!!!!! Whedon: PICK ME!! PICK ME!! I have thoughts on this!! Jones: Jones: no Whedon: b-b-b Whedon: [weakly] b-but the tropes Whedon: [weakly] i-i need the tropes to live Whedon: [weakly] p-please Whedon: [weakly] the tropes Whedon: [pathetic cough]
Jones: also in the midst of this a whole herd of elk mysteriously dies Jones: possibly from overexertion during a pick up basketball game King: Poe: Jones: It could happen
Jones: so this girl sees some classmates going to a party Jones: so she puts on her michael myers mask and kind of stalks around in the background Jones: as you do
Jones: there’s a summer camp that was once the site of a slasher-type massacre. It was on the other side of the lake, up the road with the gas station, you know, the one  old man McGee ran? He used to sell sodas in cans, not with the pop tops. With the pull tabs. They don’t make those anymore, you can’t even get them. King: so about that massacre Jones: this is what we call local color
Jones: so i had to take the ferry over to terra nova. so i tied an onion to my belt, as was the style at the time. we didn’t have white onions on account of the war Koontz: [crying] when are we gonna get to the massacre
240 notes · View notes
homopessimist · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
the wolf holds the heart between her teeth
an american werewolf in london (1981) dir. john landis / florence + the machine - howl / yellowjackets s2e7: "burial" / moonface - heartbreaking bravery / týr and fenrir (1911) by john bauer / tumblr post from @lupi-usque-ad-finem / "hounds of iron | naafiri cinematic" - league of legends / mongrels (2016) by stephen graham jones / instagram post by @violenttradwife / have a nice life - hunter / tropical malady (2004) letterboxd review by frances meh / ethel cain - famous last words (an ode to eaters)
268 notes · View notes
brokehorrorfan · 5 months
Text
Tumblr media
I Was a Teenage Slasher by New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians) will be published on July 16, 2024 via Simon & Schuster.
A slasher story told from the killer's perspective, the 384-page horror novel will be available in hardcover, e-book, and audio book. Jon Bush designed the jacket cover. Read on for the synopsis.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.
Pre-order I Was a Teenage by Stephen Graham Jones.
114 notes · View notes
literary-illuminati · 1 month
Text
2024 Book Review #8 – The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham James
Tumblr media
This has been on my tbr for long enough that I entirely forget what originally put it there – the only thing I actually knew going in was that the author was ‘the My Heart is a Chainsaw guy’ (I have not read My Heart is a Chainsaw yet either). Given the genre, that was honestly probably ideal. As was the fact that a blizzard hit a couple days after I started it and I’ve been reading it looking out on a frozen snowscape – it’s very much a winter sort of story.
The story’s told in five parts of wildly varying lengths, each with it’s own endearingly cheesy b-horror movie title and each following a different protagonist. The first four each follow one of a friend group who, as a bunch of fuckup teenagers, trespassed on hunting grounds that were really supposed to be reserved for elders and shot a bunch of elk they had no right to – including a pregnant young cow who was for one reason or another special. Ten years later, the Elk-Headed Woman drags herself back into the world, and begins getting her vengeance for the death of her and her child on each of them (and everyone they care about) in turn.
I have a longstanding opinion that a full-length novel is just too long to sustain a real horror story – by 300 pages things have fairly reliably collapse into urban fantasy or action or farce. The breakup into different parts solves this very well – they’re all very much connected and interwoven, but each feels like its own distinct narrative unit with its own tension and rising action.
And this is very much a horror story in the classic, just barely short of shlocky sense. A trespass against vague but understood sacred laws that leads to horrific and bloody retribution against everyone involved is as close to archtypal horror as you can possibly get, after all. The last section is even focused on a Final Girl! Specifically, it’s a subgenre that I can’t really name but feels very familiar to me – and one I’ve always been a huge fan of, anyway. It’s somewhere downstream of The Count of Monte Cristo, a story where the agent of supernatural doom spends the majority of the story consciously working in the background, manipulating events and exacerbating the protagonist/victim’s flaws to lead them to a contrived but tragic end? Think the netflix Fall of the House of Usher, but like about the exact opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
Class is very much something the book cares about. All four protagonists grew up poor on a reservation with little in the way of wealth or opportunity, and by the time they’d turned eighteen all four of them were the kind of young asshole who made life just a little bit worse for everyone around them dealing with the same shit. Ten years latter the three of them who’ve survived that long have gotten over themselves and matured in their own way (and to their own degree), but none of them are exactly flush with cash or living lives of bourgeois respectability (though Lewis comes close). The precarity and only tenuous connections to the society around them just make them better prey for what’s hunting them, of course – in every case, death comes after the (either metaphorical or very viscerally literal) destruction of the few close ties they have, and the only one to survive is also the only one who could really expect people to come rushing to their rescue.
Speaking of close ties the protagonists have – the book’s conception of gender is fascinatingly weird, or at least fascinating in the sense that I’m not at all sure how intentional it is. Of the four main victims, one dies alone at eighteen, and the other three who survive the next ten years are all pretty much explicitly saved (or at least improved and uplifted) by a relationship with a woman who, if not flawless, is basically strictly his moral and practical better. Even the most consistent fuckup of the group has a redeeming feature of being willing to do just about anything for his daughter (despite having lost the chance to really be a big part of her life several times over). With one exception, these women all then die, messily, entirely and explicitly to fuck with and ruin the lives of their men. It’s like someone read Women in Refrigerators and went ‘well there’s an idea...’. It’s blatant enough that I feel like it’s got to be making a deliberate point, but (unless it’s just genre emulation) what the point is does escape me slightly.
Also on the note of stuff I’m quite sure is going over my head at least a bit – basketball! It’s a pretty vital thread running through the entire book, to the point that one of the big set pieces of the final act is literally a basketball game with the monster. Which, like, I watched enough bad anime as a small child to find contrived game-playing under unclear mythic rules with things that really want to kill you instinctively endearing, but I can’t really do anything with this except just point at it.
So as the title might imply, this is a novel that’s concerned with race – all but I believe exactly one character is either is either Blackfeet or Crow, more than half the book takes place on a reservation, and a chunk of the rest is spent having to deal with racist assholes of varying severity. Now, I admit that I have at this point a probably overly cynical view of books that end up on breathless ‘socially conscious horror’ or ‘s/ff from diverse creators you NEED to read’ lists online, but I was still rather pleasantly by how matter-of-factly this was handled? I suppose the best way to put it is that culture, upbringing and racialization deeply inform everyone’s characters, but it never feels like the book is preoccupied with providing some assumed naive and impressionable audience any Important Lessons or provide Good Representation to valourize or emulate? Which is probably just a sign I need to raise and re calibrate my expectations, but.
The monster doesn’t exactly work as, like, a coherent character in terms of her skills and abilities, but as a monster the Elk-Headed Woman is great. But then I love contrived fucked up tragedies and am a longstanding partisan of Spooky Deer Horror, so I suppose I would say that.
So yeah, fun read!
55 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
84 notes · View notes
gabelish · 5 months
Text
Tumblr media
The Only Good Indians // Stephen Graham Jones
89 notes · View notes
wormwoodandhoney · 10 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
books read in 2023: the indian lake trilogy [my heart is a chainsaw & don't fear the reaper]
Jade [...] breathes all the corruption in her lungs out. Well, not the blackness, she supposes. Not the horror. Never that.
163 notes · View notes
Text
“[F]inal girls may come from the tradition of scream queens, but that doesn’t mean scream queens are final girls themselves. Yes, scream queens are menaced by horror, and yes, they survive their ordeals, but what their screams tend to do, actually, is bring the men in to deal with this bully. These scream queens are, after all, “white women in peril,” usually from some “dark” monstrosity—a giant gorilla, say. Their main function in the story is to cringe and run, and be abducted. Scream queens are damsels, perpetually in distress.
The final girl is no damsel. She doesn’t scream to call a man in to help her. No, she takes this lumbering beast down herself.
Specifically, she’s the only who can. The authorities can’t, bullets can’t, but the final girl, when all the chips are down, when this campaign of terror has reached a fever pitch, she finally—unlike everyone else—turns around and fights.
The reason she can is that she’s the built-in governor on the slasher’s cycle of violence. How werewolves have silver, vampires have daylight, and zombies have headshots? What the slasher has is the final girl.”
- from Stephen Graham Jones’ “Let’s All Be Final Girls” for CrimeReads.
914 notes · View notes
thedaddycomplex · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Deer Lady from Reservation Dogs and Elk Head Woman from Stephen Graham Jones' book The Only Good Indians is the horror team-up we need.
[Elk Head Woman 🎨 by @shoomlah]
91 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
Books of 2024: NEVER WHISTLE AT NIGHT: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, ed. by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
This has a bunch of authors I already love in it (Stephen Graham Jones, Darcie Little Badger, Waubgeshig Rice, and Rebecca Roanhorse!!), and several authors I've been meaning to try (like Tommy Orange, Nick Medina, and Kelli Jo Ford, to name a few), so I'm really hyped for them all to be together in one volume! Plus dark fiction is very much my jam (especially when it comes in a bright and colorful package).
20 notes · View notes
Text
The Info-Dumpers who Love Characters Website is totally sleeping on the best Info-Dumping Character of All Time:
Jade Daniels, the 17 year-old half-indigenous girl from Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw.
In everyone’s defense, character-driven slow-burn literary fiction that is also a slasher (stab stab 🔪🔪🩸) is a hard genre to sell. Many of us who love one part of this equation don’t love the other.
But Jade has captured my whole chainsaw ♥️, and I CANNOT be normal about it. Jade has never met a person at whom she wasn’t willing to spout random facts that they have exhibited no interest in. She can bring ANYTHING back around to connect to her hyperfixation which is, coincidentally, slasher movies. And she is the most vivid, alive, real-to-me protagonist I have ever encountered. Because of the way she hyperfixates and info dumps, not in spite of it. (Which surely says something about me but again, I am among friends on this webbed site!)
Jade makes completely normal, totally hinged choices like:
(When we the audience are first introduced to her) Going up to a group of construction workers having a trash fire in the middle of the night and being like, “If we were in a slasher right now, this is what the plot line would be. Also, have some random slasher movie facts.” (Their response: Are you okay? You seem like you are not okay.)
Writing extra credit essays for her history teacher about the tropes and conventions of the slasher genre. For four years. Not what he asked for, but what he got. (These essays are included in the book and are a godsend for those of us who are not already slasher fans! They literally help the reader understand the story beats as they unfold, while simultaneously giving life to Jade’s voice and helping us understand what makes her tick.)
Deciding the New Girl At School has all the qualities of a Final Girl, the slasher film trope in which there is one girl left alive to confront the killer and stop the slasher cycle.
Trying to warn the New Girl At School that she is going to be The Final Girl, by putting a VHS copy of the 1971 slasher Bay of Blood and all of Jade’s slasher extra credit essays in her mailbox. With a note. A note that says that she is going to be The Final Girl in a slasher cycle that seems to be starting up. (Jade is just trying to help! So helpful.)
Of course, the core of this novel is: What is going on with Jade? After all, she actually wants a slasher cycle to start in her town. (She also wants the slasher cycle to be stopped at the proper moment, to ensure that the vengeance of the slasher is balanced by the justice of the Final Girl.) She does not see herself as a possible Final Girl, but she is willing to help the richer, prettier, more appropriate classmate who she thinks is that girl. Why, why, why?
To be clear, the novel does not posit that something must be wrong with a person to be intensely, obsessively interested in something or for that thing to be horror- even slashers! But Jade’s behavior is, like I said, not entirely hinged, even for a slasher fan. Something must be up.
The novel gives us all the clues we need to peel back the layers of what’s really happening, and when truths are revealed, everything just *clicks.* Themes are introduced and then reinforced on multiple levels. There is a bear. 🐻 (The bear is the not the slasher.)
And throughout, Jade gets to be fully-human and fully seven-fucking-teen. Even though she is on the cusp of adulthood, she is still a child, and a wounded one at that. (Her wounds in no way fucking diminish her.)  Her judgment is often impaired. Her actions are often questionable. Her hair-dye jobs gets so bad, even she thinks its gross. She is so alive, and so deserving of love. 🥹 
I love her.
I would fight for her.
I desperately want to make soup for her, and let her tell me about the Scream franchise (I do not care about the Scream franchise), and give her a safe place to sleep. Even if doing so makes it way more likely that I’m about to get murdered.
Jade Fucking Daniels. My chainsaw-hearted, info-dumping hero protagonist. I salute you, my final girl.
Tumblr media
153 notes · View notes
valencitaflaherty · 3 months
Text
all of these i'm looking forward to reading, which is exactly why i have trouble picking one to start with. i'll be going in order of most to least votes.
30 notes · View notes
caribeandthebooks · 1 month
Text
Caribe's Mystery/Thriller/Horror Fiction TBR - Part 1
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
18 notes · View notes
aquitainequeen · 8 months
Text
First character in The Only Good Indians: *is haunted and driven to his death by ghost elk*
Me: Damn. What happened to cause that?
The narrative: *reveals that in the backstory he and his friends once hunted and killed a whole load of elk in an area reserved for the tribal elders*
Me, knowing next to nothing about hunting or Blackfeet traditions and customs, but still aware that You're Not Supposed To Do That: Well, shit.
The narrative: *also one of the elk was pregnant*
Me, again knowing next to nothing about hunting but I do know You're Definitely Not Supposed To Do That: So, these guys are doomed.
55 notes · View notes
literary-illuminati · 1 month
Text
Something very cosmically satisfying about a horror story where a weird fucked up hoofed prey animal slowly and patiently chases a human through the wilderness until they're collapsing and dying of exhaustion and exposure.
30 notes · View notes