Top Ten Movies of 2021

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Alright – here we are, having survived the trials and tribulations of the holidays and thankfully back to the grind of “regular” life. I had a little bit of a longer break between my last post and this, but sometimes life happens and that just can’t be avoided. Well, as we kick off a new year, whatever that means, it is often popular to do a retrospective on the last. All over the horror groups I follow on Facebook, people have been posting their lists of their favorite (or most hated) films of this last year, and it has really brought into stark contrast for me how few new movies I watch.  Out of the 104 horror movies I watched last year, only eight were actually released in 2021 and three of those were the Fear Street trilogy, so I can’t feasibly do a top ten. I guess I just don’t have my finger on that particular pulse.

But I can create a list of my favorite first-time-watches of the year, the films that were new for me.  And with one caveat, that is just what I will do. My one additional rule is that I’m not going to include anything on my list that I’ve already written about it on this blog, so with a shout out to the previously detailed Dark Night of the Scarecrow, The Unknown, Jakob’s Wife, and His House, among others, here, in the order I watched them, is my…

Top Ten Movies I Watched Last Year That I Haven’t Written About Yet

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

Where had this movie been all my life?  Ken Russell’s take on the Bram Stoker tale is a glorious mix of ridiculous B-movie monster flick, art house pretensions, over-the-top camp, and unsettling, grotesque horror. Where else can you see a very young Peter Capaldi heroically playing the bagpipes while chasing long toothed police officers, psychedelic visions, that could have been at home in The Devils, of Jesus being attacked by a giant serpent puppet, naked snake ladies slithering out of baskets, and a mongoose released from a surprisingly spacious sporran? Really, this one has it all.  Seriously, it’s a weird flick, but really fun, absurd, and somehow even a bit successful as a horror movie.  I wish I remembered more details now, but its oddness defies lucid description and I think I’ll have to watch it again pretty soon.

Orphan (2009)

I hadn’t given this one a second thought when it came out. Somehow it looked like a rote, jump scare filled evil kid movie and it didn’t call out to me. It’s only thanks to a student of mine having watched it last year and singing its praises that I deigned to give it a chance and I’m so glad I did. To be fair, it is filled with jump scares and features an evil kid, but it’s anything but rote. Rather, it is deliciously excessive and delightfully sleazy, while featuring solid, impressive, earnest performances which somehow ground the whole affair.  Vera Farmiga as the grieving mother starts the film off with a real emotional bang and Isabelle Furman, who was only 10 years old at the time of filming, is just amazing as the eponymous malevolent orphan, Esther – the kind of villain it’s hard not to side with as she is, while certainly evil, threatening, and unnecessarily cruel, also pretty damn awesome.   No plot details as this one has twists and turns aplenty and could easily be spoiled, but I strongly recommend it.

The Woman (2011)

Far from subtle, this parable of gender dynamics and patriarchal violence from Lucky McKee, is surprisingly effective.  The permutations of its plot rarely surprise, but in its moment to moment, darkly comic and frequently quite ugly presentation of the horrors of complicity, of the psychological underpinnings of reified cycles of abuse, this film manages to be totally exploitative while yielding actual emotional and social depth, before building to a satisfyingly bloody climax of great comeuppance. It’s followed by the 2019 film, Darlin’, which could be a runner up to this list. It is sometimes funny, often uncomfortable, and frequently horrific; plus, it ends on an upliftingly violent note.

Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

I had always thought that I’d seen this.  It just seemed like something I would have rented as a kid or early teen, but when I sat down to watch this last spring, I was happy to discover something utterly new to me and so, so, so very weird. Nicolas Cage delivers maximum Cage in this story of a really horrible late-eighties ur-yuppie (who could give Patrick Bateman a run for his money in a surprisingly similar story) who is either in the process of becoming a vampire or is just going round the bend. Maybe both are true – it’s hard to say, but regardless of how you read it, it does feature a Cage performance for the ages – jumping on the sofa while shouting the alphabet at his beleaguered therapist, shoving cheap joke store fangs in his mouth and running around shouting “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire,” just fully capturing, in a non-naturalistic, but no less effective manner, a man’s sanity snapping quite in half.  It’s hard to know what to make of it sometimes.  Things that seem intended as comedy sometimes feel sad, while moments of pathos deliver laughs. It’s a really unique, kind of great, little movie.

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

When I was a kid, I loved the 1986 musical Little Shop of Horrors. I played the soundtrack cassette to death, and later, once my family got a VCR, the VHS. And I remember at some point finding in a discount bin the original Roger Corman film.  I brought it home and just found it unwatchable, so different was this black and white Borsch Belt cheapie from the colorful, tuneful version I adored.  Thus, I am so glad that I gave it another chance this summer.  What a fun, odd, idiosyncratic picture.  Apparently shot in two days and one night on a leftover set, Corman’s creation really holds up as a blackly comic monster movie. I wasn’t ready to appreciate it as a kid, but this time, I found it captivating and really quite funny. Don’t feed the plants.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

I’d been meaning to check this out since hearing an interview about it with its star, Toby Jones, when first released, and I don’t know what took me so long.  This tale (from Peter Strickland – who later did In Fabric) of a soft spoken, gentle, terribly English sound engineer brought down to Italy to lend his services to an Italian horror production of some Fulci-esque violent supernatural gore fest goes to some pretty heady, wild places.  We see how appalled he is with the subject matter of his work, and follow him into a weird blurring of realities where film and life bleed into one another. By the end, I’m not even sure where we ended up, but it was a rich, peculiar, sometimes unsettling ride the whole way there.  I’m sure I’m going to revisit this and maybe write further about it in these pages before too long. In the meantime, I strongly suggest grappling with this exploration of the inherent ugliness of horror, featuring some of the grossest fruit mutilations I’ve seen (that’s foley work for you).

The Lodger, a Story of the London Fog (1927)

Hitchcock’s third feature film, he reportedly described it as the first wherein he felt he had found himself as a filmmaker. This late silent era thriller is a genuinely exciting, expressionistic, and atmospheric Jack the Ripper inspired tale of murder, suspicion, threat, and revenge. A mysterious man comes to a lodging house during a spate of serial killings in foggy, spooky London. He’s got some odd hang ups about the paintings of blonde women filling his rented room and, well, all of the victims have been blonde girls (Hitchcock had “found his style”). Could he be the killer? Is the landlady’s daughter in danger? Is the local police inspector a really pushy and somehow oblivious creep? Is anything even certain by the end or are we still in doubt? This is streaming free on Youtube and is well worth the time.

Spontaneous (2020)

This blackly comic and equally tragic film featuring high schoolers inexplicably exploding was obviously made about school shootings (kids running through school hallways before a bang is heard, blood is spattered, and more young people have to reckon with horrible, senseless loss beyond understanding), but being released in 2020, and featuring quarantines and speedy pharmaceutical trials, it eerily suggested the pandemic as well.  I really liked it, eliciting laughs and tears in roughly equal measure, while leaning into a romantic angle that I was willing to buy. Regardless of which contemporary issue it is mapped onto, its exploration of the mystery and horror of death without hope of explanation or meaning is moving, funny, and occasionally shocking.   

Wounds (2019)

I had heard mostly not-great things about this first foray into English language film from Babak Anvari (of Under the Shadow), but I’m glad that I gave it a try.  This story of a seemingly sociable enough bartender dragged down a rabbit hole of viral video violence, body horror, and nigh-Lovecraftian weirdness before ultimately confronting the absence at his core kind of rattled me.  There are many moments where I’m still not sure what exactly was going on, but it got under my skin, creeped me out, and lingered in my mind well after finishing the viewing.  I get how this would not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it was very badly reviewed in general, but I found that it delivered a mature, uncanny, and rewardingly both fleshy and cosmic brand of horror. I’m very curious to check out some of Nathan Ballingrud’s work, the author upon whose story it was based. Added to the basket.

Godzilla (1954)

This is another film I could have sworn I’d seen on some rainy Saturday afternoon in my childhood, but having recently finally seen it, I think I must have only watched later iterations. Wow, for a fifties monster movie, featuring a guy in a rubber suit, this lands with real gravity. But, really, how could it not?  Released in Japan only nine years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and focusing much less on the giant lightning breathing lizard than on the devastation of a civilian population, Godzilla features a threat beyond imagining awoken by nuclear testing and the only scientist who has found a way to stop it, unwilling to do so for fear of a new horrible weapon being unleashed on the world, having been delivered to humans who cannot be trusted with such awful power. And while it was clearly filmed on a budget, the filmmaking is totally effective and the monster can be actually scary—the sound design alone is pretty chilling—but probably nothing disturbs quite so much as the simple image of small children being scanned for radiation.  Just the night before, I had watched the disappointing Godzilla vs. Kong and this was a great antidote – pretty much the opposite movie in every conceivable way, and such a rewarding watch.

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And that was 2021. Ok, there were other things too: an ongoing pandemic, family health concerns, worldwide economic issues, and all sorts of stuff that was not exactly fun. But, these ten movies were bright spots.  I look forward to the new discoveries this next year holds. Happy New Year all!

A Christmas Treat

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Well, it is Christmas time, and with it comes the expectation, sometimes unfulfilled, that we will all gather together with family and friends to share in the warmth of community and close contact.  It’s time to travel home, wherever that might be, to come together with those you most care about. To warm yourself by the fire, or just in the glow of colored lights, while outside the cold and the dark press in. And it is a time for indulgence – to treat yourself to something sweet, something rich, a bit of luxury, with the grey expanse of January and February stretched out before you. Not to oversell it, but today’s film is just such an indulgence—a classic about which I seriously doubt I have something new to offer, but writing something anyway is a gift I give myself. If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out before reading as spoilers abound. At the time of writing, I know it’s on Shudder.

Black Christmas (1974)

Bob Clark’s holiday proto-slasher classic (which I’ve previously touched on here) is such a stunning piece of work that it’s shocking to think that it was rather poorly received on release.  It seems that reviewers of the day saw it as nothing more than a sleazy bit of pulp – just a killer picking off sorority girls one by one in grotesque death scenes, just producers cashing in on the juxtaposition of the holiday atmosphere with violence and death. And to be fair, it is all of those things, a paragon of pulpy body count cinema, full of tension, discomfort, and some real scares, but it is also such a deeper film experience, full of life well observed, alternatingly hilarious and tragic and terrifying and horrifying, all in a tightly constructed little package. What a holiday treat!

I think what most stands out about the film is the degree to which its characters are given room to breathe (until they’re not).  There is a lived in quality to the sorority house and in the relationships between the girls who live there. In an early sequence, the camera moves around and within the house, suggesting the perspective of the killer even when it isn’t directly giving us his POV (which it also does), catching glimpses of the young women and the points of connection or conflict between them.  Amidst the warm cacophony of their little pre-Christmas gathering, we overhear fragments of a conversation between Barb (Margot Kidder) and her mother – who it seems she won’t be spending the holiday with – a moment that will have a domino effect for the character throughout the rest of her time in the film, fueling her bitter, angry drunk behavior, but also telling us something of what hides beneath her tough demeanor.

We also get many establishing moments for the other girls, meeting them a bit – the sweet, doomed Clare (Lynne Griffin), saying goodnight to her boyfriend, excited and a bit scared at the prospect of introducing him to her parents; Phyl (Andrea Martin) lovingly embracing her big, shaggy mustachioed boyfriend, who will later make such an impression as a foul-mouthed Santa; all of the girls forcing the house mother, Mrs. Mack (Marian Waldman) to put on the ugly nightgown they’ve bought her before she goes off to find some of the bottles of booze she’s strategically hidden around the house; and significantly, Jess (Olivia Hussey), fielding a call from her problematic boyfriend Peter (Kier Dullea), wherein we start to catch wind of the possible discord between them and of his emotionally abusive tendencies.  Even in the case of some characters who are more roughly sketched out, there are small details, subtleties which help them feel more solid, more present, more real.  These are never disposable teens, waiting to get picked off; they are likeable young women who care about each other, who are sometimes cruel to each other (I’m looking at you, Barb), who have lives and hopes and dreams.

Of course, none of them will make it home for the holiday – none of them will survive at all.  One after another, they are all killed by somebody, a killer who we never really see, and about whom, we never learn a single thing. We don’t know why he’s in this house, or why he kills, what his name is, or what he wants at all.  And that is scary. After each murder, he calls the girls, using what we learn late in the film is another line in the house, and vocally unloads his unhinged psyche.  It is in these phone calls that the film first approaches the horrific.  There is something so threateningly beyond understanding in his psychotic stream of consciousness psycho-dramas; the phone calls feel like a violation, like an assault from the beginning, and it only gets worse. I have heard others wrestle with the text of the calls, trying to glean some sense of his story, but I think it is ultimately futile, and for me, it is so much more satisfying to have such an absence at the center of the action.

There is an interesting comparison to be made here with many other slashers, especially for those that spawned franchises.  Often, even when we don’t know the killer’s true identity, that killer takes focus, occupying the center of the frame. It is often the killer who gets fans. It is often only the killer who returns for the next installment.  This film is the opposite – the girls are the protagonists from start to finish and while the killer intrigues (and we are given at least one significant red herring to suspect), we never learn enough about him to connect to something – he never gets ‘cool.’

Instead, we have a bunch of young women to connect to, to root and fear for, and to lose.   And the film takes their side, though many characters who should do so as well, fail to.  We see all of them navigating inequities and dangers that seem startlingly contemporary (I suppose, highlighting how little progress there has been in some areas): presumptuous romantic partners exhibiting a potential for violence; police officers who don’t take their concerns seriously (such as when Barb reports Clare’s disappearance, but it isn’t until Clare’s boyfriend storms into the station that the police decide to start an investigation); and assumptions that their bodies and what may be growing within their bodies are not their own to make decisions about.

Made one year after Roe v. Wade, it is striking how straightforward the abortion subplot is presented. Jess is pregnant. She doesn’t plan to have the baby. Peter really doesn’t figure into this decision at all.  She has her own life plans, and changing them to satisfy this moody, piano destroying man-child is simply off the table. Interestingly, Clark has said that the film wasn’t attempting to make a political statement, but it is inherent nonetheless.  The intention may have been simply to set up a character who both Jess and the audience could grow suspicious of – someone we’ve seen get angry, even violent, someone who seems out of control, and has a motive, but in taking Jess seriously, and in never making her question or regret her own decision, the film perhaps accidentally stakes out a position concerning bodily autonomy and agency of character. Sadly, while she may overcome Peter’s attempts to control her body, to cancel her will, she is doomed to a more final violation of self, even if we never actually see it happen.

But what we do see, and hear, is so effective.  The movie is just tight as a drum, constantly setting up elements which pay off spectacularly, editing moments together for contrast or build in such effective, riveting sequences.  Of note for me is a short stretch when, while taking part in a search party for a missing child and/or Clare, an unnamed young lady sees something terrible and starts to scream. We see our protagonists start and run in the direction of the sound, but Clare’s father, who has been trying to find his missing daughter, gets there first. We see a look pass over his face – shock and horror –then relief –then sadness, right before the young girl’s mother comes running up, sees her own child, inhales to scream and – we cut to a phone ringing in the sorority house. It’s the killer, who will subject Jess to more of his horrifying psycho-sexual carrying on, having just killed Mrs. Mack. While she’s on the phone, the camera shows so much empty space in the house all around her. He could be anywhere. She is alone. A shadow falls on the stairs that she doesn’t see. Then feet appear and – it’s Peter – not the killer –unless he is –but he’s not –but is he? He’s here to tell her that she will be carrying the baby to term because he has decided that they are getting married and that’s just that (the killer might have been more pleasant). It all takes about two and a half minutes; and it is all so rich with nuance and real sadness and danger and suspense and character. It is a microcosm of the whole film.

I love all kinds of horror movies, but I particularly appreciate when films in which a lot of people die actually make some space for grief, when films filled with terrible things can allow characters to reckon with them, to have regrets, to be human. This is so present in the Barb arc.  Early on in the film, stinging from the conversation with her mother, Barb lashes out at Clare right before she’s killed.  As the film progresses, we see Barb get more and more drunk and inappropriate, sometimes hilariously so, but it also becomes obvious that underneath her prickly exterior, she blames herself. She drove Clare away to who knows where and is responsible for whatever has happened to her.  She lashes out at the others, screaming at them to stop laying this blame at her feet, but I don’t think they ever have. It’s only her own guilt manifested, projected. Finally, Jess puts her to bed to sleep it off, and it’s moving to see the tenderness with which Jess cares for her belligerent, troubled friend. Finally, it is awful when drunk and defenseless, she is stabbed to death in her bed with a crystal unicorn as carolers sing downstairs, covering her screams. Again, we have a feast of character and suspense and deeply felt emotion and terror.

I could go on endlessly, describing other well-constructed and brilliantly acted sequences, other well observed nuanced life details (I love that Claude the cat jumps up on the lap of poor, dead Clare and starts licking the plastic bag on her face that suffocated her – because sometimes cats lick plastic – it’s just a weird thing they do—maybe Bob Clark’s cat did), but it probably serves the movie better, would serve you the reader better to just go watch it again (I really hope no one is reading this first –too late now, I suppose). It’s Christmas. Treat yourself.

Also, in the spirit of the season, take care of yourselves out there.  May your coming year be free of psychos in the attic shouting obscenities at you on the phone!

Awakening on a Cold December Day

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I don’t know how December is treating you, but here, it has been grey and dark and cold and misty. Plus, the air quality is bad enough that the government is sending everyone text messages that they should just stay home and watch ghost stories. Ok, well, the first part of that was true. But yeah, nothing suits a grey December quite like a somber story of ghosts and loss and buried trauma. This is one of those.

The Awakening (2012)

In no ways revolutionary, but capably constructed and carried out, Nick Murphy’s classic ghost story (which he wrote and directed) makes good use of its post war Britain setting, a small, likable cast, and a few good, creepy set pieces.  It may not hold up as a masterpiece for the ages and was not terribly well received upon release, but watched in a dark room on a rainy day, it offers a few chills, some charm, and a tidy, affecting payoff.

Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is a paranormal investigator in 1921 London, specializing in disproving occult mumbo jumbo but, racked by her own losses (her parents when she was quite young, a lover during the war), apparently desperate to be proved wrong. She’s approached by Robert Mallory (Dominic West), a teacher at a boarding school in the country where a boy has just died, possibly due to the ghost long said to roam the halls, a private home until 20 years prior. After some convincing, she ventures off to the old house to put this haunting to the test.

After unpacking a prodigious amount of scientific equipment, laying traps for any troublemakers attempting to simulate a spirit, and actually undergoing a few eerie encounters, she makes quick work of it, both identifying some children that had been bullying the dead boy and trying to scare her and the teacher who, shattered by his time in battle and desperate to toughen his charges to survive the horror he has witnessed, had left the boy out in the cold where it seems he died of an asthma attack. No ghosts—just boys being boys and men being incapable of processing emotion in an ethical fashion.

The supernatural disproven just in time for half-term, all the boys but one, who seems to be an orphan, go home, no longer terrified to return after the break.  Florence makes ready to leave as well when she sees the apparition of a young boy and decides to stay on to determine what exactly is afoot.  This leaves only her, the head housekeeper, Maud (Imelda Staunton), the orphan boy, Tom (Isaac Hempstead Wright—Bran of Game of Thrones), Mallory, and a bitter groundskeeper, Edward Judd (Joseph Mawle) on the grounds of the ominous manor.

Florence redoubles her efforts, shaken by what she has seen but somehow drawn in personally. She strikes up a friendship with Tom and Maud, a romance with Mallory, is assaulted by Judd, and is beset upon by creepy, musical rabbit headed dolls, spooky doll houses tailor made to unsettle, ghostly hands rising from the pond in front of the house, and the vision of an angry man shooting at her with a rifle.

This is not to mention the fact that some other characters just seem off.  Before becoming violent, Judd already strikes one as a danger, and the otherwise gentle Mallory is heard shouting at someone unseen whenever he is alone.  This house is not a happy place.

There are twists and turns aplenty and a final revelation which might be predictable if you went in looking for it, but which I must admit, took me pleasantly by surprise.  And all of it presents a fairly poignant account of people haunted by loss, incapable of letting go of their mourning, their guilt, unable to see through the myths of their own memories to view the past directly and find a way to live.  Whether a former soldier with survivor’s guilt, one who had avoided battle, brimming with shame and hate, the mother of a murdered child, or one who has all but entirely blocked out the extremities of a childhood trauma (and hence, must awaken), everyone here must come to terms with some truth and either succumb to misery or find some way forward.

These themes are certainly not new to the ghost story, but are handled competently with a degree of poise. We do not have here an implacable specter, vengefully assailing the living, but rather, an absence, a loneliness, a pain that cannot heal, that will not be forgotten, reflecting the ache at the core of all the characters we come to know who are still drawing breath.

The cinematography is attractive enough and, along with Daniel Pemberton’s lilting and rather pretty score, contributes to maintaining an effectively elegiac and uncanny climate, agreeable to inhabit. While the affordable 2012 digital filming, with its grainy blacks and somewhat oppressive over-reliance on muted old-timey green filters has dated poorly, it does get the job done, and allowances can be made for working within budget limitations with the technology available at the time.

Plus, there are some solid little scares along the way, the centerpiece of which may be the sequence in which Florence finds a doll house representing the school building, in which she finds tableaus of scenes she has recently witnessed, culminating in a miniature of the room she is currently in, where her doll is looking into an even smaller version of the house and a figure approaches from behind.  Of course, it’s gone when she turns around. By the time the story has revealed its secrets, one might wonder exactly why the spirit felt driven to unnerve her thus, but the pleasures of the moment perhaps justify a possible lapse in internal logic.

In the end, Murphy has crafted an affable little spooker, grounded enough in character and feeling to warm the viewer to its cast of variously broken individuals, with sufficiently suspenseful filmmaking technique to provide some atmosphere and chills, and tightly enough plotted to offer a couple of gratifying surprises. 

Hunted by the Past

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So when I first set up this blog, I created three main categories to go in the sidebar: Film Reviews, Theory, and Books.  And somehow one of these has gotten pretty well populated and the other two remain rather sparsely so.  I guess the thing is that everything takes time.  If I write about a film, I probably watch it once to enjoy it and then a second time to take notes and consider it before sitting down to write.  Depending on the length of the film, that’s about 4-6 hours of pre-writing prep.  But if it takes me a couple of weeks (or sometimes longer) to finish a book, it’s daunting to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Anyway, I just finished reading something. I really liked it. I hope you don’t mind that these are first impressions.

The Only Good Indians (2020) by Stephen Graham Jones

Assuming that, like myself, many readers here may see more horror films than read horror books, I’m going to try to be a bit more careful here about spoilers.  So the story largely follows four Blackfeet men who in their youth carried out a bad piece of hunting, going after a herd of elk in an area reserved for elders of the tribe and killing them en masse in a bad way, slaughtering more than they could ever actually use, cruelly and disrespectfully (It’s hard to imagine truly respectful killing, but this is the opposite).

Over the next ten years, they all find themselves haunted by the ghost of that day, both in an emotional/psychological manner and in a really quite literal sense.  Something has come back, something that longs to hunt them down and pick them off one by one, after ensuring that they each taste something of the terror and tragedy they had wrought so glibly as young men.

Yes, they are being haunted by an elk.

It doesn’t sound that scary, but the story is often unsettling and there are some turns that are absolutely brutal.  This avenging presence takes its time and really works its way under their skin. 

A large portion of the book is given over to following one of the four, Lewis, who has moved off the reservation, married a white woman, and gotten a job at the post office.  He has obviously taken steps to leave his past behind him, but it lingers. He is torn by ambivalence regarding his heritage, his past actions, and the people he’s walked away from.

Roughly ten years after the carnage of the inciting incident, which resulted in the four friends being banned from hunting on tribal lands and Lewis and one other deciding it was time to leave the reservation, he flashes back to that day and from then on, starts feeling like he is being watched, toyed with, that he can’t trust the people in his life.  I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler (I already said they were being haunted) to say that he’s right, but the way it plays out, it is easy to doubt. He really goes round the bend, descending into a self-destructive and violent paranoia. I mean, he is basically right about everything, but he is also, by the end of the first part of the book, quite mad, dangerously and tragically so.

Really – some of this gets pretty rough.

It is at this point that the worm turns and what had been merely a vengeful presence, a memory, a sadness becomes embodied—taking physical form and implacably seeking her revenge.  Here the book also takes a stylistic departure, shifting between a third person narration of the actions of Lewis, Ricky, Cassidy, and Gabriel and a second person, speaking directly to the elk-woman or Po’noka:

“What you do after you’ve made your hard way back into the world is stand on the side of the last road home, wrapped in a blanket torn from a wrecked truck, your cold feet not hard hooves anymore, your hands branching out into fingers you can feel creaking, they’re growing so fast now.  The family of four that picks you up is tense and silent, neither the father nor the mother nor the son saying anything with their mouths, only their eyes, the infant just sleeping.”

It is a striking turn and initially took some getting used to, but it has an interesting effect throughout the rest of the novel as, from one line to the next, the narrative may shift, situating the reader in the position of the killer, the aggrieved party seeking retribution, while still readily identifying with these four guys, all well drawn, each deeply flawed, but trying to do better—utterly human, and hence unforgivable, two legged, rifle carrying threats from the perspective of the elk.

I don’t want detail the events of the plot because there is effective suspense here, and the book is worth reading, but thematically it is interesting and rich. It may even be somewhat muddied, but maybe that’s good.  This exploration of guilt, native identity, nature, responsibility, respect and disrespect, historical violence, revenge, inconsolable pain that can’t be forgotten, a past like a millstone round the neck, and the question of a future freed from that weight is all the more rewarding for the fact that it is messy like life and not clear like a political tract.

We have endless cycles of harm having been done – to the environment, to a people, to animals, and to individual humans who repent their misdeeds, who love the people in their lives and whose loss will, in turn, harm others.  And there is a sadness that lingers, a guilt.  Life on the reservation feels bleak, a dead end road for those who stay, but life off the reservation feels like abandonment, like erasure. Everyone has done wrong in one way or another and it is not clear if forgiveness is ever possible—of oneself or of others.

And that is life, right? We take things for our own need and others are harmed and we move on. Every minute of the day. But the book asks us to pause and dwell in that space for a moment, to consider repercussions, to have a moment of recognition for the horror another has experienced.

There’s a moving passage late in the book wherein the daughter of one of the four comes across the site of the initial hunt and comprehends it in a very personal way:

“But, that story being true, it also means—it means her dad really and truly did this, doesn’t it? Instead of being the one down in the encampment, bullets raining down all around, punching through the hide walls of the lodges like she knows happened to the Blackfeet, to Indians all over, her dad was the one slinging bullets, probably laughing from the craziness of it all, from how, this far out, they could do anything, it didn’t even matter.”

It’s a heart breaking moment of horrific realization. And it is only with that, it is only by reckoning with the crimes of the past, that there can be any hope of, if not resolution – perhaps that’s not possible—restitution neither—but some kind of forward movement, growth—life. And this is true regardless of whether we’re talking about an elk hunt gone wrong or any of the endless inherited traumas of human social life. Our history is full of horror and if we never open ourselves to it, endure it, build empathy out of it, and seek in whatever limited manner we can to heal from it, we will doom ourselves to carry it without end.

Anyway, it was a solid read. I recommend it strongly and am eager to check out something else by Stephen Graham Jones.  I understand his new book, “My Heart is a Chainsaw” is supposed to be worthwhile.  Perhaps I should add it to my basket.