In The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones marries the horror genre with an indigenous slant to storytelling and theme. So, the book succeeds as a chilling horror story but also a meditation on respect and compassion for animals: I found it hard, emotionally, to read the character Lewis's initial killing of a young elk. That scene wasn't overdone, just unflinching in its details.

Here's a handful of other fiction elements that really work in The Only Good Indians: Standard third person point of view tells most of the story, but Jones's judicious use of second person viewpoint (narration with "you," not "he/she" or "I") for the elk-spirit was deliciously creepy: