It’s easy to see why Stephen Graham Jones is one of the most beloved authors in modern horror. His books are filled with vivid, terrifying imagery, he incorporates social commentary with deft grace and, of course, his intimate knowledge of the genre has made him a favorite among readers who like things a bit meta. But there’s something else that makes Jones great, and it’s his knack for weaving a kind of impish unpredictability into every single sentence.
That sense of not just unpredictability, but endless possibility, is on full display in Off The Reservation, Jones’ surprise sequel to his breakthrough hit, The Only Good Indians. Gripping, tense and a wonderful example of a sequel that reworks the original in new ways, it’s another must-read from one of horror’s best.
Like The Only Good Indians, Off The Reservation is a story of unfinished business, what happens when something is put off for so long that it grows arms and legs and starts to fight back. Nathan Yellow Tail, one of the few survivors of the previous novel, is recovering from a car accident that nearly killed both him and his best friend when he’s given a mission: Travel from the Blackfeet Reservation at Browning, Montana, to Pennsylvania, find the bones of a long-dead Blackfeet boy sent to a residential school there and bring them home. Wracked with guilt over not just the accident, but a crime that came before it, Nate agrees to go. It’s an act of atonement, he thinks, but it’s about to become much more.
There is no mapping a Jones story, no peeking around corners and getting the lay of the land. He builds narratives out of carefully selected ingredients, like quirky characters and recognizable, even mundane iconography. A modified RV, an ancient TV/VCR combo, the snack aisles of a convenience store—all of these things take their places, and Jones uses the limited perspective of his characters to create an instant nail-biter. You never know which source of tension is going to release, and when it does, whether it will do so in laughter, violence or even tears. He is a writer who, on a sentence-by-sentence level, cultivates a sense of fiction on the precipice. In Off the Reservation, Jones does that and so much more, creating a book that will keep you up all night reading.