The Only Good Indians
By: Stephen Graham Jones / Narrated By: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
Dunno what to make of this, but naturally: SGJ straddles both Halloween and Native American Heritage Month
Truly, I looked back on my first two SGJ Listens, and both are mighty huzzahs to a man who has made it his business to wind up top o’ the list whenst looking for audiobooks/stories that can pull double duty.
That said, however?
Well, lemme start with what-all’s good. First? Blow me down, Shaun Taylor-Corbett turns in a FINE performance here, really inhabiting each of the characters, relaying the grim and gruesome, pacing perfectly a plot that zips and twists along super-duperly (New word. What? You’ve never heard it before…?) well. This is a performance that was NOT phoned in, but seemed to unfold in a manner that made me feel as though I was listening to a person who was greatly enjoying himself. Things get quite fraught, SEVERAL spots along the way, and Taylor-Corbett kept me on m’ toes and listening attentively… even tho! dude! I’d scarfed some Trail Mix. P’raps I should remind one and all that Trail Mix pretty much always knocks me out cold.
Not so for this story.
The Only Good Indians has four young men who have a terrible secret, something terrible they did on a lead up to Thanksgiving. They’d piled into a truck, guns ready, and cornered a gazillion and six (Wellll, maybe 9-10) elk that tribal law says it’s wrong to shoot. The guys were youthful, full of mischief, just wanted to open fire on something, provide meat maybe, but just basically wanted to get away with crap. When a train passed by, the four opened fire (the train covering the sound of their guns), and they slaughtered the elk. One of the guys discovered that a female he’d shot isn’t dead yet. Back broken, and soon with half her skull blown away, brains oozing, she remained alive, struggling to get away.
The reason for her struggle to live? She was carrying a calf she desperately wished to protect. But as life left her, she’d cast a yellow eye at the men. It could only mean that a curse had been unleashed.
10-years later, and each of the now full-grown men are struggling to get past that night, where after the slaughter they just dumped bodies, not utilizing all they can, wasting all the elk, very much earning the curse. The first man finds himself haunted, sees the body of that elk, suddenly showing up in his vision. It starts weighing on him, he obsesses. And soon, the vision, what he believes is reality takes over.
He does terrible, terrible things.
Before he winds up losing his life. And so he joins the dead.
The elk-woman in turn haunts the other two, but she’ll take not only those men, but all they love, and all who by happenstance might be near them. All ends with a grand chase, and some exceedingly well-written impossibilities opening up. The last person standing has survived, and then all wraps up with an exhausted peace, and a terrifically high body count.
This is all well and good, and the writing is topnotch, and the narrator finally does it up right with his performance. It’s just that I never fully felt for any of the characters. Was it that I found their sin too grievous? Was it cuz the characters’ lives aren’t much should they be forfeit? Dunno, just I listened with great pleasure, applauded the gruesome imagery, but I went walking away thinking >MEH<
I guess it’s just that, in my not-gonna-pretend-to-be humble opinion, Mapping the Interior was a SGJ triumph, sheer perfection when it came to giving the heebie-jeebies. That particular tale packed a wallop. This? Wellllll…
It was gruesome; it was gory; it was a creep show after a slaughter fest.
It’s just that I didn’t particularly care.
And that’s a crying shame. Will ALWAYS give SGJ a go, but danged if he doesn’t have a truly High Bar to jump. It’s his own danged fault for making my first experience of his story-crafting whizbang eerie…!
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