This is a new edition from Tor Nightfire of a novella that they published in 2017 and I was eager to dive into it because I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Only Good Indians', one of three novels that Stephen Graham Jones tells us, in his acknowledgements here, that he wrote "in three months, while trying to remember how to write a novella". That novella was 'Night of the Mannequins', which I haven't read, but this one feels effortless. I'm sure that it wasn't, of course, because it does a heck of a lot in under a hundred pages.

In fact, while it unfolds over a few nights told from the perspective of a single twelve-year-old boy, it really tells a number of stories that could be interpreted a number of ways. All we really know for sure is the twelve-year-old goes by Junior and he lives with his mother and a younger brother, Dino, in a modular home just off the reservation, because his father is dead, drowned eight years ago. At least, I think we can safely assume that all those are facts. The rest may or may not come down to how much we trust Junior's perspective. Is he telling us what's going on or just what he thinks is going on as a twelve-year-old dealing with issues?

I certainly had issues as a twelve-year-old because that's when I moved north with my family to a very different life to the one I'd previously known. Shifting from a small town in urban Essex to a village in rural Yorkshire was quite an adjustment. However, we were a stable family with all of us alive and well. Junior has lost his father, who he never really knew, and he also walks in his sleep, while his little brother has seizures. Perhaps most importantly, their mother is starting to see someone, so their family dynamic is changing once more. Does Junior noticing this count as the trigger for everything else?

The beginning of everything else is Junior seeing his dead father walk out of the kitchen during the night. He's dressed in a full fancy dancer costume, the sort that Native Americans wear to pow-pows when they want to enter competitions. He could have been the best, Junior believes, but he never chose to walk that road, so perhaps he's pursuing in death what he didn't during life, for whatever reason. Jones makes the choice not to take us back through flashback scenes to explain that sort of decision; he restricts us to seeing dad only through Junior's eyes. Junior initially thinks he's dreaming, of course, but then he finds a bead on the floor.

Of course, given that this is horror, it quickly escalates and we're tasked with figuring out how to take what Jones tells us. Is Junior struggling with the idea that his father could soon vanish entirely from what few memories he has and manifesting him in dangerous ways at this crucial point in any young man's life? Coming of age often isn't easy even when life is straightforward and it's not straightforward here. Or is there a supernatural take here? Is dad being rebirthed under the house in some sort of chrysalis? If not, what is it?

And what's going on with the neighbour? Does he a play a larger part here in the broader story Jones isn't telling us or does he just get caught up in the periphery of whatever's going on? One powerful scene has Junior seek refuge under the house because that neighbour's four dogs are after his blood. Spoiler alert: the dogs die, but I couldn't tell you how it happens. Is it Junior in a fugue state, rationalised into something else entirely by an overloaded brain? Or is it his dad in whatever post-death condition he's in? I couldn't even tell you what this is. He's more of a ghost than a zombie but Junior believes he might be feeding on Dino in some form. "He really could have been anything," is a particularly telling line at a particularly telling moment.

Of course, Junior may be manifesting him into some Native American spiritual form, and there may well be all sorts of cultural material here that I'm not seeing because it's not as overt as it was in 'The Only Good Indians'. Certainly Junior and his family are Natives and I can only guess that there's meaning here about them living off the reservation. Given where things end up, I have no doubt that there's a lot of commentary about family here across generations. Junior is in his last days of being a pre-teen for much of the novel, turning thirteen three-quarters of the way in. However, he's a father about turn to forty at the end, with a son of his own that reminds him of the past. There are other cycles here too that I won't spoil.

All of this makes 'Mapping the Interior' a very deep book. I didn't read it in 2017 so this edition is my introduction to it. I know what I've taken away from this first reading but I wonder if it will read the same on a second or third time through. I get the feeling that I'm never going to read it the same way twice, because it's vague enough to allow interpretation, because my own life will have changed and I'll subconsciously bring some of that to the table and maybe because I'll even be in a different mood next time. It feels like a lurker of a novella that doesn't seem to be much until we think about it and realise that it's a heck of a lot, at which point it takes root in a deep place inside us that will flavour how we return to it in the future.

I liked 'The Only Good Indians' because it wove a few clearly Native American stories together in a particularly Native American way. I like experiencing different cultures through fiction, as that can touch on underlying truths more than non-fiction, which is reliant on facts. I think this plays better, because I could never quite tell where it was going. It feels looser but it's really a lot tighter and it may well start to haunt me, albeit hopefully not like the fleeting memory of Junior's dad haunts him. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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