A dark read but well with your time. A great thriller!!

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

It took me a while to get into this and put all of the pieces together, but once I did it was a brilliant piece of work. The way the stories were interwoven created a chilling story that followed from character to character for a fantastic horror read.

This is a awesome book. It is a great book and will be a nice additions to our collection. When this book was given to me I was not aware I needed to read and review, I thought it was something I could just read at my leisure.

I want to thank Netgalley for giving me a copy of this one to read. THANK YOU NETGALLEY!!

This book scared me and by scared I mean completely terrified me. The images that still haunt me have made it so I will never look at elk the same.

This is a very intense revenge story wrapped in myths and nature. We follow four Native American men and their journey after committing an evil act against nature and rez rules. It isn’t pretty. I definitely think if you can’t handle blood and gore and violence, this book is not for you. There were scenes where I just had to take a step back. The book plays with your mind and you never know when something is going to happen. You just know that characters are going to die, so you don’t want to get attached to them.

The book played like a movie in my mind. The dialogue was well written and the scenes were laid out in such a way that they spread out before your eyes.

It did take me a bit to get used to the writing style but once I was in the groove, I was in it.

This book is definitely for those who want a scare. It’s dark and bloody. If that is your jam, pick this one up.

This is the first novel I have read by this author. I had read a short story by him that I really enjoyed and I guess I can say his writing style while character-centered feels very cinematic. I say this because in each scene I could easily imagine being played out in a film. I will admit that the first third of this book was a bit hard for me to get into and I pushed on through only because of how many people kept saying how great this book was.. I found the sheer paranoia of the first character to be unsettling and kinda annoying. But once you make it to the halfway mark the story starts to get more interesting and better. I liked the way the story circled back to the beginning and had an unexpected turnout.

I enjoy books that give me a fresh look and insight into a culture, not our own. Stephen Graham Jones' masterful The Only Good Indians, does exactly (and a lot more) that. with the Blackfeet Indians of Montana. (Jones is a member of the tribe). I read Jones' novel courtesy of NetGalley and Sage/Gallery Press.

Jones weaves an intricate tale which combines a truly frighting horror story of an illegal elk hunt gone disastrously wrong with a brutally honest look at contemporary Native American lives - the despair, the sense of a world fading into emptiness, the poverty, alcoholism, and the overriding sorrow of lives lived in poverty (both economic and spiritual).

Four men embark on an elk hunt, not for fun, but food. Knowing they are on reservation land restricted to hunting by the tribe's elders, they brutally slaughter nine elks, including one with calf., and are caught by tribal police and punished.

Ten years later, the men are hunted down one by one and savagely murdered by something that may or may not exist. Savage does not do just to the onslaught of horrors Jones vividly creates. This is not for the faint of heart.

The Ony Good Indians is darkly weird, disturbing, and vicious. It is also a spellbinding read that I won't soon forget.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the eArc of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. First, I have to say this book had an extremely unique storyline and plot. I appreciated the juxtaposition of the Native American culture with horror and social mores. Some of the horror elements were downright creepy and definitely made you question the line between imagined and real evil--and whether or not we are coerced into violence by malevolent forces or by our own hand of insanity. As far as the writing style and plot choices go, it just wasn't my cup of tea. I sometimes had difficulty following along, and I wished for characters to go a different route. However, I can see a large group of people who would covet this book and find it quite special.

As a diehard horror fan, I tried really hard to like this book, but it just wasn’t for me. The beginning grabbed my attention but then I got lost. I had to reread several sentences to understand what was happening and that kept pulling me out of the story. I stopped reading at about 45% . Maybe I’ll come back to it at a later date.

Thanks for the opportunity to read this book.

10 years ago four friends crossed a line on the reservation and they got busted. Over the years they each found their own way to deal with the event. Now, their time to cope has ended and something has found its ways back.

This book is a fast paced ride of the mental anguish that haunts the surviving friends as they try to move on with their lives. Each of the three sections of the book end with heart pumping intensity.

While this book definitely had its moments that left me creeped out and uncomfortable I hoped for more sustained tension. The game of basketball maintained a strong focus of novel, but didn’t seem to have a cohesive reason for its inclusion. A few of the main characters became analogous. Their speech patterns and actions were interchangeable leaving me confused as to who was acting or speaking. This made the balance of the characters feel uneven. And while I could speculate at the reasons for some characters actions I was unable to understand the reason as to their amplified presence.

This was well done - just not my genre. I liked the Native parts of this the best, horror the least.

One of the buzziest books of the year, and with good reason. The Only Good Indians is the perfect balance between suspense and gory horror. There is gore, but it serves the story and moves the characters forward. Perfect for fans of beautiful writing mixed with suspenseful horror.

This was a book you want to take some time with, as Jones' storytelling is purposeful and makes you pay attention. The reader gets to know so much about the characters, and then are torn apart by the events of the novel, while still understanding that this is exactly where the actions of these characters have led them. There are graphic descriptions of violence inflicted on animals and people that made me cringe! So if that bothers you, I probably wouldn't recommend, but if you're into long-awaited revenge plots and the particular style of indigenous storytelling found in Stephen Graham Jones' previous stories, pick this up!

I received a copy of this book as an early review copy from NetGalley and Saga Press. All opinions are my own.

In The Only Good Indians, four young Blackfeet Indian men find that their past is inescapable. This is a wonderful tale of revenge, identity, and tradition that makes you terrified to think of what from your past could haunt you.

Thanks to NetGalley and Gallery/Saga Press for the ARC.

Four childhood friends find themselves breaking long-held reservation traditions when they hunt a herd of elk during the off season on elder territory. What ensues is a decade long revenge plot spurned by a man vs nature conflict unlike anything else you've ever read before.

My first warning to anyone reading this book is that it is quite violent and gory at times. I don't generally appreciate gore in my thriller/horror genre. And this was extreme. And included a lot of violence against animals. But I was able to push past it because this was a true page turner. A page turner that you know from the beginning is going to end in a lot of blood and death, but a page turner nonetheless. I honestly haven't read anything like this before! All I can say is, read it for yourself!

For me this book had an extremely slow start. The chapters covering Lewis were long, drawn out, and just plain boring. I almost quit reading several times but pushed on through. The pace did pick up when the story returned to the reservation. There was even quite a bit of excitement towards the end. It was an ok read but certainly doesn’t compare to the horror genre I am accustomed to reading.

I don't normally read horror books but I kept hearing about this book. The writing is great, the story is interesting, but I'm not a fan of this kind of story. The fact that others would love this made me stick through the story (again, good writing meant I didn't DNF it) and I wanted to see it through. I would definitely recommend it for those that like horror.

The 10 yr anniversary of an illegal elk hunt has devastating consequences for a group of Blackfeet Indians. Visceral and heartbreaking. I cannot recommend it enough! So. Damn. Good.

Dark and precarious, this story will leave you wondering what is reality and what is in the mind of the narrator. Well written and suspenseful, this book will keep you turning pages well into the wee hours.

This book was so insanely hard for me to get through, but I have seen so many people post about it and it being nominated for awards, so I thought maybe it would get better. In my opinion, it did not. I really did not enjoy this book at all. The wording was so awkward and it made the story very difficult to follow throughout most of the book. I also thought that the amount of unnecessary, small characters did nothing to add to the book's quality. In fact, I felt it distracted from the main story and halfway through the book I was questioning what the point was, at all.

Thank you to the publisher for this advanced copy. SGJ weaves a wonderful story that also is perfect for the current state of the US. I look forward to more of his work.