The Only Good Indians

The Only Good Indians is a horror novel by the American writer Stephen Graham Jones, published in 2020. It centres on four Blackfeet men, and it is written with a clear awareness of the horror and slasher traditions it is working inside.

Ten years before the main action, the four friends, then young men, hunted an elk herd on ground that belonged to the reservation's elders. What happened on that hunt is the novel's buried past, and its consequences begin to reach them a decade later.

The four have scattered since. Ricky works in North Dakota and lives well away from the reservation, and Lewis has married a white woman and also left home. The book shows each of them, in turn, being found by something that has been waiting a long time.

The revenge at the centre of the novel passes from the men to a daughter who had no part in what happened, and Jones shifts between viewpoints so the reader watches the trap close from several sides at once. It is a standalone novel.