Here's something very different again for my Books of Horror Go To List pick for the month. It's a novel that's generally categorised as horror, a genre for which it won multiple awards, but it could easily be seen as general fiction. Stephen Graham Jones, last seen in fictional form as a tutor in 'A Head Full of Ghosts', is a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, as are the central characters in this book, and, while it's effectively creepy as a horror novel, its real value is in that backdrop.

That's largely to do with the fact that Jones doesn't hide what's going on, spilling the beans early on so we know pretty quickly who the monster is and why she's doing what she's doing. That strips the book of a lot of the suspense it could have had, endowing it with inevitability instead. He does wrap it all up very neatly indeed, going a little further than I expected, but this really isn't about twists or surprises. It's about what it means to be indigenous in the U.S., not so much Blackfeet in particular but Native American of any tribe, and it does that deeply but effortlessly.

We're given hints at what's to come during the prologue, in which Ricky Boss Ribs is killed outside a bar in North Dakota by either a herd of white men or a herd of elk. The former seems most likely but he sees the latter and that surely has meaning, especially when we shift to Lewis A. Clarke, an old friend of Ricky's, who's seeing elk too. In particular, he's seeing the young elk he killed almost exactly a decade earlier and still feels acutely guilty about it, enough that we still wonder if what he sees is a manifestation of that guilt or something more literal.

As we learn this story quickly enough and it's echoed on the back cover blurb, I guess it can't count as a spoiler, so I'll explain. Ricky and Lewis used to be part of a particular clique of Blackfeet men, along with Gabe and Cass. They were a little wild, as young men often are, and got into trouble as something of a habit, partly because they did and partly because they're Indian and so were seen that way anyway by white folk. There's a fine line between prejudicial belief having a root in truth and the prejudiced living up to a stereotype just because. This book walks that line with an aching realism.

One particular bit of trouble happened on the last Saturday before Thanksgiving ten years earlier, towards the end of elk hunting season. Without anything to show for their efforts, they go up to an area called Duck Lake that's off limits to them, reserved for the elders of the tribe, and they find a herd of elk ripe for the taking. They're now bogeymen to the elk, or butchers, as Gabe puts it. They don't get away with it, being promptly caught by Danny Pease, the local game warden, and forced to throw the bodies back. One of them was a young female that Jesse didn't know was pregnant, a fact that haunted him then and continues to haunt him now.

In fact, it's that young female elk that Jesse's seeing now, way off the reservation, on the floor of the house he lives in with a white woman, Peta, whenever he looks down through the ceiling fan. It makes him think and those thoughts don't end up in a good place, for him and for anyone around him, not only Peta but their dog Harley; Shaney, his new colleague at the Post Office, who's Crow; and his older friends like Silas. What I will say is that I expected this book to be Lewis's story and it isn't. It's just his section, almost a novella of a hundred and ten pages that then hands over to the next leads like a runner in a relay race. Gabriel Cross Guns and Cassidy Sees Elk are up.

Jones is a teacher as well as a writer, the Ineva Reilly Baldwin Endowed Chair at the University of Colorado Boulder, working in the English department. For good or bad, that rings very true when reading his particular style. He tells this story in third person present tense, preserving that even when the focus of that third person shifts to the narrator, who becomes "you". His sentences are often long and loping and his conversations are naturalistic but carefully crafted. There's a real voice here and I often got a James Lee Burke vibe, more in impression than vernacular. Jones also mentions Joe R. Lansdale in his acknowledgements and that rings true too, because they're both oral storytellers who happen to use the printed page as their medium of choice.

I can imagine that this style might make some readers struggle, especially if they came to it with the expectation of reading a horror story rather than the Great Native American Novel. I found it fascinating, though, because Jones has a knack of saying things of profound importance without ever seeming to try. It's an incredibly effortless style that I'm sure took plenty of effort to master. What caused me some issues were the abundance of brand names and slang terms, many of which I didn't recognise, and the amount of basketball. I haven't read this much about basketball since I tackled Josh Malerman's 'Daphne', which was about a basketball player.

It's notable, I think, that quite a few of these Books of Horror Go To List selections are surprisingly deep reads, given how many absolutely aren't. Many of them aren't really horror novels at all but veer into horror territory through doing something else, books like 'Tampa', 'Tender is the Flesh' or 'Winterset Hollow'. This fits that too, the core story of revenge being horror but somehow less important than the stories behind it, ones about Native American identity. On that front, this may well be the deepest of them all.

There's a huge amount here about Native American culture and tradition, but just as much about generational trauma, prejudice and addiction. There's plenty about how Native Americans live, in reservations or off them, and plenty about how they're perceived by those who exist outside that world. There's a huge amount in Jesse's section about relationships, whether it's his marriage to a white woman, his abiding friendships with other Blackfeet, his newer ones with white people or his newest with a Native American of a different tribe. The section with Gabe and Cass is deepened by the inclusion of younger characters, a boy called Nate who shares their sweat lodge ceremony and Gabe's daughter, Denorah. All these themes evolve across the book with addition of perspectives.

At the end of the day, this is a vast achievement as a piece of writing and I appreciated it greatly, but I enjoyed it a lot more as general fiction than I did as a horror novel. That feels strange to say, but the horror simply isn't the point and Jones didn't even attempt to build much suspense, until an impressively suspenseful ending at least. It seems almost inappropriate to pass it off as genre material. It does so much more. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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