This review originally appeared on Goodreads on November 6, 2021.

The Only Good Indians: A Novel

By Stephen Graham Jones – S&S/Saga Press – July 14, 2020

Review by Robin Marx

Brisk and thoroughly entertaining, this horror novel centers on four Native American men stalked by a vengeful spirit ten years after shooting a pregnant elk.

The pace and narrative are both extremely engaging, but the highlight for me was the characterization. The characters grapple with their ethnic identity, poverty, lifestyle choices, and feelings of obligation to and entrapment by the reservation from which they all originate. Their view of the world vividly comes across through the prose and choice in metaphors.

The only real issue I had was close to the end of the book, where an incredibly tense and bloody sequence is followed by…an extended one-on-one basketball tournament. While I understand what the author was trying to do, it wasn’t very interesting for this non-sports fan and killed much of the momentum built up during the preceding chapter. The book still has a satisfying conclusion, but the basketball stuff felt tedious and extraneous.

Overall, this book was exceptionally well done and I look forward to reading more by the author.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on August 23, 2024.

I Was a Teenage Slasher

By Stephen Graham Jones – S&S/Saga Press – July 16, 2024

Review by Robin Marx

Set in 1989, I Was a Teenage Slasher is the first-person confessional of Tolly Driver, a disaffected youth living in the rural town of Lamesa, Texas. While fundamentally a decent person, Tolly has struggled with a sense of rootlessness since the untimely death of his father. Lamesa feels stifling and small, but college and prospects of a life outside of his hometown feel distant and unattainable. His plight goes from bad to worse after crashing a pool party, where his drunken awkwardness is punished with near-fatal hazing at the hands of his classmates. A sudden brush with the supernatural saves Tolly’s life but leaves him fundamentally changed. Tolly undergoes a strange transformation when night falls. A passenger in his own body, he witnesses himself commit horrible murders that he is powerless to stop. Tolly’s only friend Amber begins to suspect that he’s becoming a slasher: not merely a conventional serial killer, but a supernaturally enhanced murderer of the Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees variety. As the death toll rises, Tolly and Amber work together to test his newfound abilities and attempt to prevent future bloodshed.

I Was a Teenage Slasher combines a surprisingly poignant coming of age story with an exploration of the slasher horror subgenre. It avoids becoming too heavy-handed and on-the-nose, but the unwelcome transformation Tolly experiences feels like an allegory for puberty or some manner of gender awakening. The treatment of slasher tropes is likewise fascinating. Tolly does not simply don a mask and embark upon a quest for revenge, instead the slasher quality is transmitted, like vampirism or lycanthropy. In addition to preternatural resilience, in true slasher movie tradition Tolly gains the ability to cover more ground when hidden from his prey’s sight. Even reality starts to bend around him, as if the world is facilitating his inexorable urge to kill. Broken chainsaws roar to life with a single pull of the start cord. Teenagers who know they are being actively stalked irrationally elect to go skinny-dipping by moonlight. I Was a Teenage Slasher leaves the reader with unanswered questions about the supernatural phenomena at the heart of the narrative, but die-hard horror movie fans will find themselves nodding and grinning at how events develop over the course of the book.

Following so close on the heels of The Angel of Indian Lake, readers can’t be blamed for feeling a sense of déjà vu. Many familiar Stephen Graham Jones elements are present and accounted for. Apart from the slasher-centric plot, there’s a painfully realistic presentation of suffocating small-town life. Jones returns to poke at the “Final Girl” trope once again, and there’s even a horror movie-obsessed Native American girl as a supporting character. Lamesa feels like a distinct setting from the Indian Lake Trilogy’s Proofrock, however, and hapless Tolly has a very different voice than the wounded, combative Jade Daniels. While there are touches of the unreliable narrator here and there, I Was a Teenage Slasher is also written in a more plainspoken style, with less of the challenging impressionistic touch of Jones’ earlier works.

While it feels lighter and less intentionally literary than The Only Good Indians and the Indian Lake Trilogy, I Was a Teenage Slasher is a fun summer horror flick in novel form. Existing Jones fans are sure to enjoy the ride, and it also serves as an approachable introduction for newcomers curious about one of the genre’s hottest talents.

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This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on April 10, 2024.

The Angel of Indian Lake

By Stephen Graham Jones – S&S/Saga Press – March 26, 2024

Review by Robin Marx

Four years have passed since the events of Don’t Fear the Reaper, the second volume in Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake Trilogy. As The Angel of Indian Lake opens, Halloween is coming to Proofrock, Idaho, but—still scarred by the Independence Day Massacre of eight years ago and the bloody rampage of serial killer Dark Mill South’s so-called “reunion tour” of four years past—the picturesque lake town is doing everything it can to downplay the spooky season. Fresh out of prison for a parole violation, Proofrock’s perennial scapegoat Jade Daniels is likewise keeping a low profile. Back in the only home she knows, as flawed and unwelcoming as it is, she ekes out a quiet life as the local high school’s history teacher. Proofrock is one town where the crimes of the past refused to stay buried, however. When a sheriff’s vehicle lost in the mountains during Dark Mill South’s killing spree is rediscovered, a high school student’s quad-copter drone footage also reveals a number of fresh corpses in the immediate vicinity, including students of Jade’s. Try as she might to avoid becoming sucked in to the bloody affair, a subsequent daylight murder on the high school’s doorstep demands Jade’s immediate attention. Chaos erupts, bodies fall, and the legendary Angel of Indian Lake from Proofrock’s frontier days lurks around the periphery.

Much like Don’t Fear the Reaper, The Angel of Indian Lake takes place in an extremely compressed span of time: immediately before, during, and after Halloween. The pacing is similarly relentless, but the stakes are higher than ever. Not only is Proofrock itself facing an existential threat, Jade must put herself in harm’s way to to protect the few surviving residents of Proofrock that hardened and traumatized Jade has allowed herself to love. While she has become somewhat (understandably) ambivalent to horror movies after being immersed in so much real-life carnage over the past eight years, once again Jade puts her encyclopedic knowledge of slasher flicks and their tropes to work in an effort to live to see another day.

As with the first two books in the Indian Lake Trilogy, Jade remains the wounded but defiant heart of the narrative in The Angel of Indian Lake. Each of the books depends heavily on their nuanced portrayals of a misunderstood and neglected misfit that has a tendency to vehemently reject the few helping hands extended in her direction out of fear of betrayal. Misanthropic characters are difficult to get right, and are always at risk of being found frustrating or unlikable by readers, but Jade has always been rendered with such aching empathy that the audience can’t help but share her fears and see past the bulletproof shell she has constructed around herself. Jones describes her as the girl whose heart is too big for her body, and the success of the books (and popularity of “Jade Daniels is my Final Girl” T-shirts) has made it clear that she resonates with many readers. At her core, Jade remains the same complicated character that won over readers with her first appearance in My Heart is a Chainsaw, but she has matured and grown. She’s still as rebellious as ever, but time, therapy, and the support of her chosen family have rounded off some of her edges, creating a more polished and even-tempered version of herself. And where previously readers were only provided occasional glimpses directly into Jade’s mind via horror film-related essays submitted to her high school high school teacher, The Angel of Indian Lake shifts from the third person to a first-person perspective, with Jade herself as the narrator. Constantly under pressure as she struggles for her life, Jade’s mind runs a mile a minute, thoughts swirling with movie trivia, hopes, fears, assumptions, misinterpretations, and jumped-to conclusions. Her stream-of-consciousness perspective is sometimes a challenging one, as it’s occasionally difficult for the reader to distinguish actual events from flights of fancy, but the intimacy of her perspective enhances the experience. Jade and her horror-drenched worldview are the highlight of these books, making the move to first person perspective a wise storytelling choice.

While it was certainly present in the previous volumes, Jones’ masterful and empathetic characterization of supporting characters is particularly noticeable in The Angel of Indian Lake. Like Jade, her best friend Letha and her husband Sheriff Banner have also grown into themselves while doing their best to cope with Proofrock’s numerous tragedies. While the characters’ dialogue is by turns moving, wry, or devastating, Jones also manages to communicate so much through understatement, words left unsaid, and subtle body language.

In the Acknowledgments section of the book, Jones frankly discusses the challenges he faced writing The Angel of Indian Lake. While it must have been an intimidating task attempting to live up to the fan expectations accumulated with the first two books, it was surprising to see how little material he had prepared ahead of time. None of this blank space was obvious while reading the book, the ease with which Jones picked up plot threads from the first two volumes and interwove them with new events made it seem like he had everything exhaustively planned from the start. Minor characters have surprising destinies and seemingly throwaway elements receive unexpected payoffs. Jones makes executing a satisfying horror trilogy look easy, in a way that very few authors to date have managed.

With The Angel of Indian Lake, Jade Daniels’ story gets the ending it deserves. Expect award nominations to follow.

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This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on November 28, 2023.

Conan: Lord of the Mount

By Stephen Graham Jones – Titan Books – September 26, 2022

Review by Robin Marx

Lord of the Mount opens with Conan as the last survivor of a vanquished raiding party. Surrounded by the dead, as the battered barbarian’s consciousness returns the first shapes that come into view are that of a small group of cattle and their herder. The eyes of both the cows and the man tending them have a strange purple tinge to them, hinting at long term use of the intoxicating powder of the black lotus. Wary of the shifty lotus addict, Conan nevertheless accepts a meal of wine and steak—carved directly from the flanks of the passive, drugged cattle—from the man. Known as Jen Ro, the herdsman tells Conan of his destination: the village of Trinnecerl, where ale and women are plentiful. He warns that the mountain pass leading to the village is guarded by a fearsome monster, however, the so-called Lord of the Mount. With no better destination in mind, the rootless barbarian wanderer elects to accompany Jen Ro, hoping to indulge himself in the pleasures Trinnecerl has to offer and see this Lord of the Mount for himself. Conan soon finds himself fighting for his life against a foe unlike any he has faced before.

Lord of the Mount is the first installment in the Heroic Legends series of monthly digital short stories starring Conan the Barbarian and other pulp fiction heroes created by Robert E. Howard. While not the first piece of new Conan fiction produced via the partnership between Titan Books and Howard franchise owner Heroic Signatures (that would be the Conan – Blood of the Serpent novel by S. M. Stirling), news of the Heroic Legends series was welcomed by Conan and Howard fans for a number of reasons. One was that the Conan stories and the sword & sorcery subgenre of fantasy as a whole originated as short stories and still tend to be most at home in that format. Another reason was the roster of authors listed with the series announcement. Experienced and reliable Conan authors such as John C. Hocking and Scott Oden were present and accounted for, yes, but there were also unexpected curve-balls like Laird Barron and V. Castro. Of the latter group, Stephen Graham Jones was a particularly anticipated contributor, as not only is his star currently ascendant within the horror genre (a field with considerable overlap with sword & sorcery), but his 2021 autobiographical Texas Monthly essay My Life With Conan the Barbarian had already fostered a sense of kinship among many sword & sorcery fans. Jones gets it, he’s one of us. We wanted to see what he could do with the character.

The strong points of Lord of the Mount are its minimalist premise and brisk pace. No time is wasted getting to the good stuff. The scene is set, Conan hits the road, and a knock-down, drag-out battle with the Lord of the Mount follows.

Unfortunately, Lord of the Mount is not entirely successful. Unlike many Conan pastiche writers, Jones made little effort to emulate Howard’s writing style. But he also didn’t seem to write in the colloquial, almost folksy voice Jones used in other works like The Only Good Indians. The result is sort of a hybrid, neither fish nor foul. Dissimilar to Howard, but also not quite Jones’ natural narrative voice.

The portrayal of Conan also felt off in parts. During his battle with the Lord of the Mount, in multiple instances Conan is described as “screaming.” Conan has never struck me as much of a screamer, but even if he had occasion to scream at least some of these screams should have been changed to “bellows” or “roars” for variety’s sake. Also, when Conan reunites with Jen Ro in the story’s denouement he reacts as if he has been subjected to a betrayal worthy of violent retribution. However, at the beginning of the story Jen Ro is pretty forthright when describing the danger of the Lord of the Mount and the means he uses to evade it, making Conan’s rage feel excessive and unwarranted.

While I expected more from a Stephen Graham Jones take on Conan, Lord of the Mount is still worth the small price of admission. I appreciate Titan Books’ willingness to go beyond safe and expected Conan writers, giving readers a chance to see a variety of different interpretations and portrayals of a familiar character.

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This interview originally appeared in Grimdark Magazine Issue #36 on September 27, 2023. It later appeared online at Grimdark Magazine on October 8, 2023.

An Interview with Stephen Graham Jones

Interview by Robin Marx

It’s a truism in the entertainment world that it takes twenty years to become an overnight success. Since the 2000 release of Stephen Graham Jones’ debut novel, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, he has released a string of critically well-received novels and novellas. However, it was not until the 2020 release of The Only Good Indians—which masterfully blended a sensitive meditation on the Native American experience with visceral, folklore-inspired chills—that Jones was catapulted to the forefront of horror stardom.

Jones has followed up The Only Good Indians with a new longform fiction project, the Indian Lake Trilogy. The first installment, My Heart is a Chainsaw, won the 2021 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, the 2022 Shirley Jackson Award, and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Horror Novel. Its sequel, Don’t Fear the Reaper, was released as a hardcover on February 23, 2023. We spoke with Jones ahead of the release of the paperback edition of Don’t Fear the Reaper about his fan-favorite heroine, “elevated horror,” and recent slasher flicks.

[GdM] Your prickly, slasher-obsessed heroine Jade Daniels became an instant hit after her first appearance in My Heart is a Chainsaw. Her return in Don’t Fear the Reaper was highly anticipated, as demonstrated by the multitude of online selfies of fans sporting “Jade Daniels is my Final Girl” t-shirts. Why do you think Jade resonates so much with readers?

[SGJ] We all root for the underdog, don’t we? I think that might be part of it. And, that’s built right into horror. You always design your antagonist as bigger and badder than the hero, such that when and if they best that baddie, then it’s an upset—that underdog shouldn’t win. Neither should Jade. But heart and stubbornness count for a lot. Jade’s got heaps of both.

[GdM] In both fiction and horror cinema, creators often struggle with the middle installments of trilogies. How did you tackle this challenge with Don’t Fear the Reaper?

[SGJ] First, I knew about that middle-of-the-trilogy slump, so was intent on avoiding it. Second, I had revisit two of my favorite middle instalments, The Two Towers and The Empire Strikes Back, to get the tone and angle of approach close to right. The trick with a middle instalment of a trilogy is that you’ve got to both “win” the dramatic line while also not yet concluding the narrative arc. The Fellowship bests Saruman, say, and that’s great and wonderful, but, too . . . Frodo’s in a pretty bad place, and Sauron’s still simmering over there on the horizon, portending all the sacrifices that are going to need to happen to vanquish him and restore Middle Earth. Or, Luke fights Vader to a near-standstill, which is to say, his Jedi training’s working out, but, too, not only does he lose his hand, but he finds out Vader’s his dad. To add onto the “down” of Empire, Han’s in carbonite, too. So, taking both of those as templates, as leads, as bars to rise to, in Reaper, Jade had to face off against all the badness in Proofrock this time around—including her own demons—but, first, in spite of that, the novel needed to end sort of “down,” and, second, it couldn’t complete her trilogy-long arc.

[GdM] Even when describing Dark Mill South’s bloody killing spree in Don’t Fear the Reaper, your work has a pronounced literary streak. How do you feel about the term “elevated horror”?

[SGJ] Not in favor of it. I feel like it’s just people’s way of saying that they don’t really like horror, but they like this horror because it’s not like the rest. But “elevated horror” or “literary horror” always feels like an insult to all the stuff not included in that category. To me, “literary” means “that which can be returned to again and again, for more and more.” As opposed to “pulp,” I guess, which are one-reads—you leave the book on the train when you’re done, as you’ve milked it for all it had. Both of those are great, though, that’s the thing. It’s not hierarchy, it’s just different modes, different intents. And readers gravitate to whichever fits their tastes. Or they gravitate to whichever fits their tastes right then. Some days you want pulp, some days want to read a thing for the third or fourth time. And, another hesitancy I have with “literary horror” is that right now it’s kind of taken as a compliment—while also being an insult to the rest of that shelf—but I can suspect a day a few years down the road where “literary” shades into a meaning more like what we hear in movie write-ups, where the code-word is “deliberate,” which always means “super slow.” I can see a day where “literary” starts to be that kind of insult. Then? Then, the pulp stuff will be the mode actually concerned with pulling the reader through by the face. Me, I’m always aiming for pulp. I long to learn to do it better.

[GdM] Do you mainly write for yourself, or do you have a certain ideal reader in mind that you strive to entertain? Is it important to you to also reach people who don’t consider themselves horror fans?

[SGJ] The crowd I write first for is the horror crowd. But yeah, I do try to, say, walk the non-initiates into the land of werewolves or whatever. I don’t want to be exclusive and form some kind of in-group where only those who’ve read all these other werewolf things can play. I think of genres as fields, with fences between them. I try to write my stuff such that the stories have legs long enough to step over those fields.

[GdM] Many readers’ first encounter with your novels is through the Indian Lake Trilogy and The Only Good Indians, but you have an extensive body of earlier work. With Angel of Indian Lake scheduled for March 2024, where would you direct readers in the meantime, after they devour Don’t Fear the Reaper?

[SGJ] Mongrels, maybe? Or the audiobook The Babysitter Lives. Or my two recent novellas, Night of the Mannequins and Mapping the Interior. Or my comic book Earthdivers, if they read comics. These are all very different from each other, too.

[GdM] You recently appeared in Outland Entertainment’s Swords in the Shadows: A Swords & Sorcery Horror Anthology with the entertainingly gruesome short story “The Dog in the Corner.” You also have the digital short Conan: Lord of the Mount coming soon from Titan Books. Can we expect more Sword & Sorcery or grimdark fantasy fiction from you soon? What is motivating this apparent new push into dark fantasy?

[SGJ] For me, it’s just opportunity in the form of invitations. I’ve always wanted to write something Conan, as he’s kind of what I cut my reader-teeth on, and I read a lot of fantasy, too. Reason I never write it? Worldbuilding. I tend to discover places and worlds as my characters walk through them. You can write a fantasy thing like that, of course, but it’ll take a while, I bet. Still? I might have to give it a go.

[GdM] For story reasons, Jade’s knowledge of recent horror releases is spotty. What newer films would she be obsessed with? Given her love of slasher flicks I suspect she’d be a Blumhouse Productions fan, but would she enjoy A24’s output? Do her preferences echo your own, or would there be some debate when choosing what to watch for a movie night?

[SGJ] Yeah, her taste is very similar to mine, surprise. Meaning Happy Death Day and Freaky would be favorites. But I think she’d also dig the indie-stuff, like Last Girl Standing, The Mooring. And talking A24, yeah, I think Jade goes for Bodies Bodies Bodies. Really? I think she goes for any slasher she can see herself fighting her way through. Slashers are models for us all. That’s how Jade uses them.

[GdM] Thank you for sharing your time!

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This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on March 6, 2023.

Don't Fear the Reaper

By Stephen Graham Jones – S&S/Saga Press – February 7, 2023

Review by Robin Marx

Proofrock, Idaho, is a small town marred by tragedy. The Independence Day Massacre that concluded My Heart is a Chainsaw, the first novel of Jones’s Indian Lake Trilogy, claimed more than a dozen lives. Eyewitness accounts of the chaos differed dramatically, but misfit high school senior Jennifer “Jade” Daniels found herself saddled with at least some of the blame. Volume 2 of the trilogy, Don’t Fear the Reaper begins four years after the bloodbath. Released from prison after a mistrial, Jennifer returns to the only home she’s ever known. While deep in her heart she knows that the nightmare isn’t over, that a legendary threat remains at large, she yearns to put the past behind her. But small towns have long memories, and everywhere she turns she finds herself confronted by the scarred and the grieving. Complicating matters even further is that her slouching return coincides with the blizzard-aided escape of Dark Mill South, an enigmatic serial killer hoping to add a few more bodies to his count.

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, My Heart is a Chainsaw introduced readers to Jade Daniels, an angry and rebellious half-Indian girl with an encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies. While much of the first book centered on her use of horror flick trivia to recognize and deal with a lethal menace in her hometown, it was also an achingly empathetic portrait of a deeply hurt and isolated young woman trying to make her way in an insular community that didn’t seem to have any place for her. She is, as Jones aptly sums up, a girl whose feelings are too big for her body. Don’t Fear the Reaper presents a slightly matured version of Jones’ Final Girl. She prefers to be called Jennifer now, not Jade. And after living through a very real nightmare, scary movies have lost their luster. Despite her attempts to move on, however, to the citizens of Proofrock she’s still the same old Jade. Circumstances also conspire to mire her in the past, as once again she finds herself in a real-life horror movie where knowing the tropes and rules of the game can mean the difference between living to see another day and joining the rapidly expanding ranks of the dead. Burying the past is a luxury she may not have.

Not only does Jennifer remain a captivating heroine, Jones extends his empathy to the surrounding cast of characters as well. Where the first book dealt with one traumatized girl, Don’t Fear the Reaper shows us a traumatized community. Horror movies usually end with the monster’s death, we’re spared the aftermath. But Proofrock is a small town. The loss of so many during the Independence Day Massacre is still keenly felt years later, and to each other the survivors are living reminders of the tragedy. The former sheriff now relies on a walker. The town beauty struggles with an ongoing regimen of prescription medications and reconstructive surgeries. Not all of the characters whose minds we’re invited into are sympathetic, some are fairly reprehensible, but Jones doesn’t play favorites. He makes us understand their motives, their regrets, their aspirations. (And then has them murdered in graphic, inventive ways worthy of the best slasher films.) For this reader, the humanity with which the characters are portrayed was the highlight of the book.

Both volumes share masterful characterization, but Don’t Fear the Reaper differs significantly from its predecessor in terms of pacing. Much of My Heart is a Chainsaw is a slow burn, but this follow-up volume is remarkably compressed. Excluding flashbacks, postscripts, and other asides, the heart of the book takes place in a matter of hours. The struggle for survival is absolutely relentless. Where before Dark Mill South’s killings may have been serial in nature—with victims separated by time and geography—when he arrives in Proofrock he launches an all-out spree. Cut off from the outside world by inclement weather, with power and phone lines failing, the residents of town find themselves immersed in a new massacre, one that many are fatally oblivious that is even occurring.

While Dark Mill South displays a degree of fortitude worthy of movie slashers Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, as in My Heart is a Chainsaw many of the supernatural elements mentioned in Don’t Fear the Reaper remain tantalizing, more often hinted at than foregrounded. Not all of our narrators are reliable, and quite frequently these witnesses are amped up on adrenaline or mortally wounded during their brushes the otherworldly. During these passages, Jones switches to a more gauzy, impressionistic style that requires one to read between the lines. It seems that there are phantasmal elements in play even beyond the legendary Lake Witch described in the first volume. Questions remain unanswered, but the dots the reader are given to connect have begun taking on an intriguing shape.

Like Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, Stephen Graham Jones balances serious literary chops with an unashamed love of genre fiction. Both My Heart is a Chainsaw and earlier stand-alone novel The Only Good Indians (2020) have attracted accolades both within and outside the horror fiction community, and Don’t Fear the Reaper seems destined to enjoy the same recognition. It’s a satisfying follow-up that leaves one exhilarated and excited for the trilogy’s conclusion. Part of me wonders if three volumes is enough, however. As any scary movie fan can tell you, the best franchises have a habit of outgrowing trilogies.

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