Stephen Graham Jones’s 2020 bestseller The Only Good Indians took home a long list of major literary awards: The Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, The Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction from the L.A. Times Book Prize, to name a few. Six years later, he’s returning to the Blackfeet Nation in Montana with one hell of a follow-up, Off the Reservation.
The Only Good Indians tells the tale of four Blackfeet friends who make the mistake of killing a young, pregnant elk. For a decade, the spirit of this elk bides its time, waiting to find a way back into the world to seek revenge on them. The result: A novel where each section tells the twisted tale of these men meeting their fate, a story that grows more horrific with the turning of each page.
Off the Reservation picks up in the same world five years later, and while supernatural elements are once again wreaking havoc on humans, it isn’t exactly a sequel.
Nate Yellow Tail—a secondary character, one of just two survivors of the massacre at the heart of The Only Good Indians—takes center stage in this new story. After Nate and his friend Sebby Spear Woman are in a car accident that nearly kills them both, Nate’s entire world feels off-kilter. However, his hospital nurse, Seine Plenty Wolf, convinces Nate that he has the power to restore balance. All he has to do is join her “holy mission.”
It may sound naive, but it’s the only chance he’s got. So, with some hesitation, Nate piles into an ‘80s-model Sundancer RV with Seine—and two other very interesting traveling companions—for a road trip to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The goal of Seine’s so-called holy mission? Find the remains of a boy who was kidnapped and murdered there over a century ago to bring him back home where he belongs. Perhaps by bringing one Blackfoot boy back home, Nate can bring another—his best friend Sebby—back from the brink of death too.
This is a horror novel, though. And one written by Stephen Graham Jones, no less. That means things absolutely will not go smoothly. You can’t mess around with the past without expecting it to snap right back. So when this crew tries to resurrect the remains of the Blackfoot boy, they dredge up much more than they expected.
Off the Reservation is an absolute rollercoaster ride! If you’ve read anything by Jones before, you know he has a really unique brand of horror. Things can get a bit weird. And then get even weirder. He’s a master at using small details to create the most unsettling feeling in the reader … and then just lets it stew. Yet he balances this out with a signature dry, pithy humor. You don’t necessarily expect to laugh out loud while reading a horror novel, but it’s guaranteed with this one.
Jones’s editor warns that “every detail matters” in this story and he’s not wrong. It is one of those novels where hints are dropped all along the way, going unnoticed until the pieces suddenly snap into place. There’s an entire section titled “Hindsight” and readers will feel that deeply when this journey comes to an end. All I’m saying is, get ready for a few jaw-dropping plot twists. Literally. My mouth hung wide open for a good minute at one point.
As always, Jones goes past the flashy horror elements to build rich characters and then sets them down within the framework of this country’s long history of colonisation, which is horrific in its own right. Mile after mile passes on this wild ride of a road trip and it becomes increasingly clear that each passenger in the RV is hiding something. Jones takes time with each of them, allowing the reader into their innermost thoughts and experiences, making them more than just a cast of characters—each one is a core component of his story.
So, if you’re looking for a new spooky season read with no shortage of action and gore, but also plenty of depth, you don’t want to miss Off the Reservation.
Off the Reservation is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis
A ragtag group of activists sets out to repatriate the bones of a Blackfeet boy taken to the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in author Stephen Graham Jones’s return to the Blackfeet reservation of his award-winning New York Times bestsellers The Only Good Indians and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
Five years have passed since the massacre on the Blackfeet reservation in Stephen Graham Jones’s breakout bestseller The Only Good Indians. Nathan Yellow Tail, one of the survivors of the revenge murders, finds himself in the hospital after a terrible accident that should’ve killed him and that nearly killed his best friend, Sebby, who is hanging on to life in a room a few doors down.
Nate’s life is out of balance, so when he is given the chance to reset his life, and maybe save Sebby in the process, Nate steps up, again. This time it’s into a camper van that is almost as run down as his broken body, filled with three older Blackfeet, to find the bones of the lone Blackfeet boy who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School—where many Indigenous children were abused—and repatriate this boy home. The problem is, when they get the bones, something terrible has escaped with them.
By turns terrifying and deeply moving, Off the Reservation is a haunting American Indian novel of survival, reckoning, and redemption, shining light on the dark corners of this country’s history while also showing the desperate choices people make when they’re put up against a wall.
