In the horror realm, his name gets passed around, though it may not carry the clout of, say, Stephen King. I had never read a Stephen Graham Jones novel before, but I’d been meaning to get to his writing for a long time. That it’s a success seems a foregone conclusion. NPR and the LA Times gave it favorable reviews, the latter of which praised it for reclaiming the “Indian curse” trope and appealing “to both the genre fan and the literary reader.” It may be a book discussed for general fiction awards as well as the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards. It’s on Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. It’s in the front displays of bookstores. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones doesn’t hide the fact that it’s a horror novel, and it’s having a moment in the literary world. In the great literary-versus-genre divide, everyone seeks legitimacy or even vindication. We revel when a work of horror writhes its way in front of general audiences who accept and even champion it. We who like the scary, dark, and macabre tend to leap at the chance to claim a successful piece of literature or film as one of our own.
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