Tag Archives: Stephen Graham Jones

Catching up with the Angel of Indian Lake

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I was on a roll there – I’d gotten two posts up in two weeks and I knew that a book I wanted to write about would be delivered soon – The Angel of Indian Lake, the third and final entry in Stephen Graham Jones’s “Indian Lake Trilogy,” the first two books of which I’ve already written about here and here. In preparation, I re-read the second book in one week, and then when “Angel” was delivered, I burned through it in about 5 days – I was ready to write and I would get a third post up within three weeks. Awesome.

And then that never happened.

I got hit with some difficult life stuff (which isn’t exactly resolved, but at least is somewhat less volatile at present), a month and a half went by without a post, and now, while I do still have some thoughts and observations about the book, I don’t remember it well enough, in sufficiently specific detail, to feel that I can really write about it in depth.

But I am still gonna write about it – so there, just in a brief, first lasting impressions kind of way. I had thoughts 5 weeks ago when I read it, and I do want to share them. Sure, sometimes life gets difficult, but I don’t want to neglect my blogular duties – it’s good for me, and I hope it can be of interest to you as well, dear stranger reading on the internet (glad to have you).

A preface to this review – it is spoiler free, but it is also written more for someone who has read the book – I don’t go deep on describing the events of the story. So, without further ado, let’s go…

The Angel of Indian Lake (2024)

In this third installment, we pick up with Jade Daniels once more, now four years older, having done a second stint in prison following the events of the first book, coming out of it at least theoretically more mature, more of an ‘adult,’ but essentially the same slasher obsessed outsider she ever was. And what’s more, still with the same crushing degree of self-doubt, hard wired to overlook her own strengths, no matter how many times she has risen against insurmountable foes and been the only one to walk away. She is always looking for someone else to step into the shoes of her beloved ‘final girl,’ never considering herself for the part, though she’s been thrust into it time and time again.

Whereas the first two books jumped between viewpoint characters in third person limited, this is entirely Jade’s book, told in first person (except some interstitial chapters, as in the first books). Jade is an easy protagonist to love and identify with, especially as a horror fan – a socially awkward weirdo who just can’t stop expounding on her favorite movies, surrounded by people who aren’t always that into them (who hasn’t been there?), terrified and scarred (psychologically, but also literally) by the horrors she faces, but always ultimately choosing to stand against them and do the hard things that need doing, losing friends, mentors, and toes along the way. It is a real hero’s journey – and one that never really ends – no matter how many times she learns her own power, it doesn’t matter. She will have to learn it again. She believes in her slashers and that belief fuels her, but she still has trouble believing in herself. You’d think she’d have learned by now, but perhaps that’s not how people work. You get a big moment of catharsis and everything feels clear – you’ve progressed, you’re better – and tomorrow, you’re back to your old ways. Actually changing is really hard. And Jade does, but it is hard fought, and there are many setbacks along the way.

Reading this volume, I found myself often thinking of belief and faith. Slashers/final girls constitute Jade’s religion. She has so voraciously consumed these stories to the point that they make up the lens through which she views her life, especially when the bodies start falling – which they do in great numbers in this case (the dead rise, bears attack, human killers stalk the woods, and more).  Her faith in her holy texts motivates her, gives her comfort, and helps her to understand this so often blood-stained world. But a key element I really appreciated is the extent to which it is not magic. Jade is constantly wrong – through all three books. She reads the events happening around her through the paradigm of her favorite kind of horror movie, and while it offers interpretive, emotional, and psychological value, as a tool for predictions, it has a pretty weak track record. She leaps to conclusions, chases after red herrings, and is forever trying to puzzle out what is actually going on and why. She’ll make a big emotional decision and try doing something because it feels like it should work, and it doesn’t, and she has to try something else. Slashers may have easily trackable rules (thanks Randy), but life doesn’t. And as with previous cases, the underlying story – the reasons for what is happening – is pretty complicated, messy even. But I think that lends a valuable, if surprising, realism to this story of resurrected spirits, unresolved traumas, and mass killers, supernatural and otherwise – life isn’t a story; it is confusing and confused, and no lens can predict it. All we can do is attempt to interpret – to use the worldview we’ve built ourselves to lend meaning to the chaos, to see the beauty of the story playing out in the horrors we must undergo – we need meaning and beauty and understanding, even when it’s wrong.

When it comes to the killer(s) in the story this time, without going into any spoilers (if you’ve read the first two books and not yet this one, you really have to pick this up and I don’t want to give anything away – I’ll just say that there are as many or more twists, turns, and reversals as you’ve come to expect), it all had a kind of magical realism to it (notable given how the slasher subgenre is so often based in a fully human murderer). To a larger extent than the first two books (though the element was certainly present), this volume premises all local folklore as seemingly true, and anything can happen if the emotions are strong enough – if it is at least poetically justified. At first glance, this seems at odds with much of the slasher canon, but in a way, the slasher pairs well with folklore. It may be the tropeiest subgenre of horror, and its iterative qualities read like modern folk stories – sitting around the campfire, trying to scare each other with a fresh telling of the tale of the call coming from inside the house, or the little girl the lake rejected, or the hook ripped off, dangling from the car door… And the folklore here lands with deep resonance – tales of the American west: settlers, religious fanatics, people displaced from their land, human lives crushed by forces bigger than themselves, those left behind when the world moves on.

Furthermore, it is a very emotional read, eliciting tears from me on more than one occasion (though to be honest, I am an easy mark, but that said, it absolutely earned those tears). And I think this may be the strength of the series, and possibly of Graham Jones’s writing writ large. There is excitement and gore and thrills aplenty, but it is all run through with such deep feeling and characters you can love and root for and sometimes mourn. I think they are quite different writers, but in this way, Graham Jones rather reminds me of Stephen King. I feel like they both come to know characters first, and then they have to follow those characters where they will, often resulting in big, circuitous, even meandering plots which are not at all about plot – they’re about people, about their hopes and fears and compulsions and failings. The book makes a breathless dash for the finish line, but it feels like it is desperately running towards a point which is not yet known, which has to be found, which has to make that emotional, poetic, mythic sense, and which will, along with its protagonist, make false starts along the way. All of this could be taken as criticism, but I feel it is a strength of the text rather than a weakness.

So there we are – I rather liked it (though maybe wouldn’t go as strong as “love” – I’d reserve that for the second book, Don’t Fear the Reaper). I haven’t even tried to describe the story – but part three of a trilogy is nowhere to start, so if you’ve come this far and haven’t read the first two books, maybe go pick up My Heart is a Chainsaw – if you read this blog, I expect you’ll likely be into it. The story here could be stated as simply as “people start dying again and Jade has to deal with it” – but there is clearly so much more to it than that. For my part, it was nice to return to Proofrock, Idaho one last time and see Jade off. This was totally engaging and intriguing and fun, and if you have enjoyed the first two volumes, you really do need to check it out.

Re-donning the Slasher Goggles: Don’t Fear the Reaper

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So this post is going up a little late. As I’ve much written about, it can be hard to choose my topic each week and this last one was no exception. I watched one early 80s folk horror about which I’d heard really good things, and while I appreciated aspects of its concept and enjoyed its madcap weirdness, certain weaknesses of its execution kept me at arm’s length and I just couldn’t get into it. I watched an absolutely gorgeous arthouse horror from a filmmaker I’d long had a blind spot for, but I need to rewatch it to order my thoughts before writing and while I loved it on initial viewing, watching it again immediately just felt a bit like homework (but I’ll do it soon – I promise). I even made it out to the cinema and saw Cocaine Bear, which I rather enjoyed, but don’t have sufficient thoughts about to fill a whole post.

Past that, I’ve been doing a bit of travel around Croatia, where I’m currently “workationing” (hooray for remote work), and that means lots of time sitting at cafes reading, and in the last couple of days, I burned through the end of a book and having enjoyed it so much, found myself going back to the beginning and almost re-reading the whole thing the next day. So let’s talk about that. Let’s return to Proofrock, Idaho for the second installment of Stephen Graham Jones’s “Lake Witch Trilogy,” Don’t Fear the Reaper.

Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023)

I think I’m going to have to do this in two parts. To do the book justice, it’s necessary to get into certain details which could rather spoil its reading. But at the same time, I really liked it and would like to offer some explication of its value to potential readers. Therefore, I will go into it first sans spoilers. And then, after a break, will discuss key elements and later revelations for a select readership that has already finished the book.

Last summer, during a few weeks of discussing the concept and some stand out examples of “the final girl,” I devoted a post to the first book of this cycle, My Heart is a Chainsaw. At the time, I had no idea that it was even part of a trilogy, so satisfyingly did it reach its conclusion (and from an interview I heard, I have the impression that it was written as a stand-alone piece, which the author later decided to return to and build on). When I heard this volume was coming out, I was even initially hesitant, feeling that the original hadn’t needed continuation (a sentiment that often arises when it comes to Slasher franchises), but I’m so glad I picked this up.  Graham Jones manages to really deepen and expand upon themes of the first work, very satisfyingly allowing characters to grow and mature, while also exploring how the effects of the first novel ripple through this town and the lives of its citizens, surfacing in a new explosion of violence.

And on top of that, the book just feels like a sprint. Whereas Chainsaw took its time, getting us behind the eyes of Jade, its narrator and eventual final girl, navigating us through a rich collection of characters and contexts that all set up possible causes of and motives for the deaths that were occurring, interspersed with her pontifications on Slasher theory, the lens through which she viewed her world, before Jade had to finally rise to the occasion, stepping into the shoes of the idealized role she’d never thought herself qualified for in a final act blood bath, Reaper just hits the ground running and doesn’t let up till it gets where it’s going. Full of intense, cinematic sequences, it is a page turner, as they say – an exciting, often gory, emotional roller coaster that left me pumping my fist in the air following its triumphant last sentence. In the lead up to releasing Reaper, I started seeing t-shirts with the slogan “Jade Daniels is my final girl” popping up on social media – for good reason. She’s an easy character to rally around.

Official shirts available here.

In many ways, this functions as a Slasher sequel, and it’s a good one. As Randy enthuses in Scream 2, there’s a bigger body count and it’s gorier with more elaborate death scenes. But in other ways, it gives space to elements that wouldn’t ordinarily be focused on (not to mention hosting characters with a degree of self-aware genre knowledge that puts poor Randy to shame). Four years have passed since the events of the first book and their weight hangs heavily on all those who survived. The town has generally recovered since the Lake Witch slayings and subsequent fire and flood, but beneath the surface, the town of Proofrock is haunted by those who were lost, by the horrors the survivors witnessed, by wounds that linger, both physical and otherwise. Into this space, Jade returns, having been subjected to a lengthy trial following her heroic and cathartic turn in the climax of the first book. No good deed goes unpunished.

Notably, Graham Jones has allowed her to change, to grow up a bit. Throughout the first volume, she sees everything through her “Slasher-goggles,” having embraced slasher films and tropes as a kind of coping mechanism to deal with a slate of traumatic experiences she’d been subjected to. In seeing things through as she does in the first book, she is allowed some personal resolution – some things are laid to rest, or at least are contained at the bottom of the lake. Though it is so unfair that she alone was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for her actions, the fact that the trial took her out of her once toxic context seems to have been good for her. She is in a more stable place. She doesn’t need to lean on the mythic resonance of her favorite films as she once had.

Ironically though, other characters have now done their homework, having lived through their own real life slasher film, and Jade (or Jennifer as she would now rather be called) is no longer the only one so versed in the lore of the sub-genre. In fact, she would rather not dwell on the material she once depended on, and resists others’ attempts to make her view new events through her old lens. Fascinatingly, these others each have a different relationship to the material. For one, it is research for survival – determined to endure whatever is thrown at her, she has obsessively worked through every slasher and tawdry thriller she can find. Another seems to have shared a similar history with Jade, living through childhood trauma and mythologizing the figures of slasher cinema, but whereas Jade was destined for the heroic, he has become a sleazy predator. Finally, a third character seems to have studied these filmic texts as models for their own cycle of murders – the movies, as Billy Loomis once said, not making psychos, but making psychos “more creative.”

Into the mix as well, comes the nigh-mythic serial killer, Dark Mill South, a hulking silent butcher right out of a later installment of Friday the 13th, Halloween, or Hatchet. He is an intimidating figure and the scenes in which Jade confronts him are some of the most gripping in the book. Also, just as her Native American (Blackfeet) heritage has done so much to shape (and sour) her relationship with her community and family, his has also contributed to the shadow he casts, particularly the implication that his many, varied, horrific killings are all to be taken as vengeance for the mass hanging in 1862 of 38 Sioux warriors, ordered by Lincoln. Dark Mill South is clearly a monster – he has done horrific things (and the time we spend inside his perspective does nothing to soften that view), but the sense that he could be enacting a kind of vengeance for such a violence of the past, that his crimes are in fact a form of justice, as brutal and implacable as an act of nature, helps contextualize him as a Slasher killer in a classic-mythic sense.

Thus, though she has successfully moved on in a number of ways, when high school kids start showing up dead all over town, just as she’s getting home, Jade is pulled back in, and will once again have to wade through a river of gore to protect those she cares about. But that is one thing that’s different this time. Four years earlier, she’d been so isolated, the weird horror kid from a “bad family” crying “slasher” to deaf ears, her relationships mostly antagonistic. This time, she does have a small community around her. Most of the town still may view her with suspicion at best, but she is now tied to some other survivors of the last massacre. She actually has a couple of friends and loved ones who she does not want to lose, for whom she will fight.

And perhaps at this point, before we get into any discussion of later developments, it’s a good time to stop if you haven’t read the book and think you might at all like to. If so, do start with My Heart is a Chainsaw. Enjoy.

This is Graham Jones – horror folk always seem so nice.

Ok, I’ll assume if you’re still here, you’ve either read both Chainsaw and Reaper or never will. So now I’m just going to geek out a bit. One thing I really appreciated was how in her roaring death cry to pierce Dark Mill South and “find the off switch,” I flashed on the mama bear at the end of the first book. Jade spent her young life failed by her family (and worse), but in this moment, she can do for her chosen family what wasn’t done for her. It’s a lovely moment. As is the denouement regarding Sheriff Hardy and Melanie. If only that meant the actual killer had been brought down.

In the first book, there is much discussion of red herrings in the Slasher genre, particularly in those that revolve around the mystery of the killer’s identity (which I’d hazard to say is actually most of them – the silent, named, masked killers cast a long shadow, but far more are unseen murderers waiting for a final act reveal).  The first time around, Jade, through her goggles, was endlessly trying to figure out what was going on. Theory after theory fell flat though because life isn’t a clean story and, well, there were actually a few killers to reckon with (in both cases, these elements are repeated). This time, even though clues are littered throughout the book, and Jade and Letha even have an extended discussion about “final girls who are actually the killer,” it’s still so easy to get distracted by the looming figure of Dark Mill South, who does, in fact, finish some kids off, but otherwise is a minor contributor to the mayhem, a convenient cover story who just happened to be brought in by the storm at just the right time. This misdirection begins before the story does, with the quote from Carol J. Clover about how the killer is invariably male.

In contrast, in both the Melanie/Spirit Elk and the Cinnamon/Ginger (or was it always only Cinnamon?) storylines, the past is coming to bear and revenge is being dealt, whether for complicity in one death many years ago (classic slasher stuff) or rooted in a twisted sense of balancing the scales following the last slaughter and a misplaced blame for the one person who actually managed to stop it last time. And while Dark Mill South is in the ground and Hardy and Melanie are reunited beneath the ice, Cinnamon is still out there, free and unaccused. It leaves things intriguingly open for the final volume. While at the end of the first book, I felt everything had been quite wrapped up, this time, I am rather waiting for the final installment, and wondering what new repercussions will follow from this one. Also – how much of a time jump will there be this time? It seems unlikely that Jade will avoid at least some length of a prison sentence.

I loved this book for many of the same reasons that I so enjoyed the first. It is both a successful, interesting, fun thriller, and at the same time, such a love letter to a much maligned genre that so many of us take so much pleasure and find such deep satisfaction in. I love how through Jade, and now also through Letha, Armitage, and Cinnamon, these “dead teenager pictures,” are revealed as emotional texts, as therapeutic, as inspiring, as art, as important. How many movies have shown some variant of sportsball as a metaphor for life, as a vehicle for a mythic hero’s journey, as the crucible in which identity is formed? We all find meaning where we do, and in finding it, create it.

And that is what we have here. It is so satisfying seeing a character like Jade, who has latched onto these works of fiction (which the general public and ‘reputable critics’ would scorn) for survival, go through so much, suffer but still be compelled to investigate, fight but also be driven to understand, and ultimately grow into a powerful woman who can and will do what is necessary, whether that means killing the killer with an appropriately phallic weapon, helping a loved one find peace, or taking the fall for a friend. It’s moving to go on the journey with her, to witness her becoming.

It’s also really fun.

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.