It also has a “Final Girl”: the daughter of one of the four men. The Only Good Indians definitely has those tropes: four young men who commit a terrible act are hunted down to the last by a vicious killer who is connected to that terrible act. Different slasher films from different decades riff and play with these tropes and a whole host of others, but for the most part, these are the tropes that remain the same across most of them, and may therefore be said to define the genre. Most slasher films focus on a killer who relentlessly pursues and murders their victims in graphically gruesome ways – all except for one: the “Final Girl”, or sometimes the “Final Boy”, the last one standing who confronts the killer and lives to tell the story (after a fashion). While I’m still not very interested in slasher films, I’ve glimpsed enough of them that I’m familiar with the tropes and conventions of the genre. And it won’t stop hunting them until it exacts its revenge. But that isn’t quite true: the past has come back – not to haunt them, but to hunt and kill them. They get caught, but they go on with their lives, thinking they can put the event behind them.

It tells the story of four Blackfeet men, who did something they really shouldn’t have ten years ago. Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians ( Saga Press, 2020) is entirely different, even though it would definitely fall under the slasher category if it were turned into a movie. That, to me, isn’t really all that scary. A slasher movie might be scary while I’m watching it, but that fear doesn’t really stick around after the credits roll. I suppose it’s that they just never really seemed all that scary to me – or at least, not in the way that I prefer. It might be because I really wasn’t all that interested in the horror genre, period (not least because I’m a self-confessed scaredy cat), but even afterwards, when I did begin to engage with the horror genre, I’ve only ever considered the slasher genre with passing interest. Despite their near-ubiquity, though, I wasn’t really interested in them. Movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, the Scream series, Urban Legend, and Final Destination were in the pop culture zeitgeist when I was in late elementary to early high school. I remember a time in the mid-’90s to around the early aughts, when slasher films became immensely popular.

Please note that the page may contain spoilers.

Trigger warnings for this novel can be found here, c/o.

The only good indians novel