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Book Review: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Gallery/Saga Press

ISBN-13: 978-1982136451

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

The past year, for me, has been the year of menacing deer. After encountering the demonically controlled deer that trap unwitting victims in the Pennsylvania woods in Imaginary Friend and the unsettling antelope shapeshifters in The Antelope Wife,  the vengeful, shapeshifting elk out for blood shouldn’t have surprised me.  Stephen Graham Jones has given us his version of  I Know What You Did Last Summer, taking place on reservation land.

Ten years earlier, four stupid kids stampeded a herd of elk meant to be left in peace, and shot as many as they could. One of them was a pregnant mother. Unable to take advantage of the meat of all the elk they had killed, they left their slaughter behind. After the incident, the park ranger banned them from hunting. It’s a horrifying scene to read, and anger-inducing, but who, and how long, pays for sins like these? Is forgiveness even possible?

Two of the boys from that night escape the reservation and are gone for years, but the first evidently doesn’t go far enough– chased by some white guys looking to pick a fight, he encounters an elk that escalates the situation and is brutally killed. The second, Lewis,  returns to the reservation with his wife for the funeral, only to have things escalate as he enters a hallucinatory, murderous state. The remaining two, Gabe and Cassidy, who have stayed on the reservation, decide to hold a sweat in memory of their friend, which turns out to be a poor decision for everyone involved. It is up to Gabe’s teenage daughter, Denorah, to outrun the Elk Head Woman and resolve things.

I had to read this strange, supernatural slasher tale more than once to understand what was going on, but it was totally worth it. The character development is well-done, the unsettling aspect of the supernatural getting more and more entangled into the destruction of these men and their families really sinks in, and the reservation setting and its conflicts felt very real. It is kind of reality-bending to see an animal that I think of as being generally peaceful out for violent revenge. Yet Graham Jones makes it all work. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: violence, gore, murder, body horror.

 

 

Posted on May 5, 2020 by , 2 comments

Musings: The Cruelty Is The Point: The Burning by Laura Bates

The Burning by Laura Bates

Sourcebooks Fire, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1728206738

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

Reading Laura Bates’ The Burning was like a dizzying fall down a rabbit hole to hell.  Anna, the main character, has moved to a new town and a new school to escape a scandal at her old school, only to find that the perpetrator has established social media profiles for her, posting provocative statements and photos that portray her in a very negative light  to classmates who already were incredibly nasty to each other, giving them the excuse they’ve been looking for to bully her (there is a parallel storyline about her visions during a search for information about a woman also unfairly turned on by her community who was burned for witchcraft in the 1650s). After attempts to deal with the cyberbullying on her own,  Anna eventually speaks up and even uses social media to reclaim her image, but  even after the uproar finally dies down, she can’t really escape what’s out there. Once you’re on the Internet, you don’t easily get your privacy back. I don’t know how common it is for cyberbullying to swing that far out of control, but it is terrifying.

Last year’s  The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter  by Caroline Flarity (review here) didn’t go quite as far wirh cyberbullying: the main character (also named Anna) has a reputation for being odd, and she is bullied, but she’s a stronger character and much of  the mockery she faces is due to her reputation as the spooky daughter of an eccentric ghost-hunter (if you have gone to school with the same kids your whole life, you’ll know how hard it is to change the way they look at you). This Anna faces personal and physical threats in a different way (a bully obsessed with her sets her house on fire) as well as ostracism due to social media (a boy she likes tries to convince her to take off her shirt, and later shows video he took to their classmates) but the cyberbullying doesn’t go nearly as far as The Burning in tearing her down. Unlike Anna in The Burning, who is just trying to make it, and reclaim her identity, with her situation central to the story,  Anna in The Ghost Hunter’s Daughter also has to fight a supernatural force and save the day.

Foul is Fair by Hannah Capin (reviewed here), also from last year, is a revenge tale based on Macbeth, where four girls conspire to eliminate the athletes who raped one of them. The girls use the Internet to track down and identify the boys, and erase Elle’s presence in social media (this seems unlikely, but certainly the plot wouldn’t work without this). Changing her name to Jade, and altering her appearance, she transfers to the school the team attends, and manipulates the team members and the girls they’re involved with until one of the boys starts killing off the others. It’s interesting that a lot depends on who has a a cellphone and where it is. Not only is it horrifying to know these boys were either participants or complicit, but the way Elle is able to manipulate them into turning on each other demonstrates vividly the poor judgment, intense emotion, and peer pressure teens experience.

These girls go through some horrific events, and the cruelty and fear of the teens in these stories is what I find really frightening. The Burning caused me to have conversations with both my middle schoolers about their experiences at school. They don’t have much access to social media, so they wouldn’t be exposed to some of the more appalling incidents, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.  My daughter, who was bullied in elementary school asked what the motivation is for someone to act as maliciously as some of the kids in The Burning. That’s the real horror for me as a parent: for some, there is no reason, or sometimes the cruelty is the point.

 

A final note:  Laura Bates is an English feminist activist and writer who founded the Everyday Sexism Project. At the end of The Burning she offers a list of websites for organizations who offer information and support to girls dealing with issues that appear in the book, and many others,

The Burning contains: cyberbullying, bullying, descriptions of pornographic images, references to abortion, rape, torture, and death.

 

 

 

Posted on April 25, 2020 by , Reply

Graphic Novel Review: Bone Parish, Volume 2 by Cullen Bunn, illustrated by Jonas Scharf

Bone Parish, Volume 2 by Cullen Bunn, illustrated by Jonas Scharf

BOOM! Studios, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1684154258

Available: Paperback, Kindle, comiXology

 

Bone Parish, Volume 2 follows the Winters family, a New Orleans crime family that created a hallucinogenic drug made from the ashes of the dead. Anyone who takes the drug, called “The Ash”, lives the memories of the deceased. The second volume opens with Grace Winters and the rest of the family attending the funeral of Wade Winters, the youngest sibling, who was killed by a rival cartel. After the funeral, Grace approaches a shadowy figure in attendance who did not approach the other mourners. He is not unfamiliar to her. After all, Andre is her deceased husband. She used the last of her late husband’s ashes for him to be able to attend his son’s funeral.

Throughout the story, Grace starts seeing herself take on Andre’s physical traits, such as seeing his reflection in a mirror where her own should be, and her eyes begin to take on the eerie purple glow that his did when he appeared to her. Her own transformation isn’t the only one occurring with the use of Ash. Other cartels are employing their own people to attempt creating their own strains of the drug, but the results are not the same as the Winters’ product. The “test cases”, typically any drug addict they pick up off the street, are attacked by the memories of the dead who want to go on living. The physical side effects the users experience can only be described as Cronenbergian. While all of this is occurring, Wade’s death has created new rifts. Grace pushes daughter Brigitte to keep creating “The Ash”, especially considering other drug families are trying to create their own strains. Brae constantly berates Grace, Brigitte, and Leon about Wade’s death, the latter of whom he believes is at fault, and about the family business. He is less than prudent and levelheaded when he meets a mysterious woman painted with a Día de Muertos skull, and gets in bed with the enemy, as well as hiring a biker gang for personal protection. Leon, despite his older brother’s tirades and everything else in play that is picking apart already tenuous familial bonds, still believes his late father’s words, that family is the only thing that matters. The question remains, just how much strain can those bonds handle before they are torn apart?

As with the first volume of this series, I am not surprised that Bone Parish, Volume 2 has been nominated for a Stoker Award. Bunn has become one of my favourite writers in the horror genre. He weaves a good yarn, and the artists who are paired with him create fantastic visuals. Scharf’s artwork adds significantly to Bunn’s story. Highly recommended.

Contains: body horror, drug use, gore, murder, sexual content

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Editor’s note: Bone Parish, Volume 2 is a nominee on the final ballot for this year’s Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel.

Posted on April 18, 2020 by , Reply
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