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When Prey Becomes Predator

Author: Stephen Graham Jones

Have you ever been afraid of dinner’s vengeance? I’m not talking about indigestion or comically bad stomach times . . . but about beef getting revenge the old-fashioned way – by resurrecting itself as a basketball playing Elk Headed woman monster with the intention to kill. Not high on your fear list? Well, put down that Big Mac and saddle up for The Only Good Indians, where dinner shows up ten years later with some supernatural murder plans and a whole lotta dribbling.

I’ve been avoiding this surprisingly acclaimed book for years because frankly the plot just sounded flimsy to me. But . . .Stephen King has gotten me to believe in carnivorous cars several times, the zombie apocalypse (which is never, ever logically explained) is a long-running favorite, and Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors is a crooning killer to die for, so who am I to ‘dis a strange villain?

It all starts on the day before Thanksgiving when four Blackfeet friends decide to hunt the traditional way. They take their guns and pickup trucks to the forbidden hunting grounds with plans to bag some elk. Of course, things go wrong, as they are apt to do. The friends kill, wantonly, and one of the kills is a pregnant elk. It haunts them, especially Lewis, who gets up-close-and-personal to kill the pregnant elk. He promises to use the calf’s corpse, to make the death worth something. But then they’re caught by the reservation police, and it all goes downhill from there. The kills are wasted, the violence unjustified.

Fast-forward a decade. The friends are all grown up and have their own lives, although they are stereotypically dissolute and the most non-sympathetic, nonentities ever penned. Lewis is the only one who is doing well in life, that is, until he changes the light bulb in his ceiling fan one day and looks through its whirring blades to see the dead body of an elk calf superimposed on his living room floor. Bam, it’s time for him to go to crazy town. Clearly, the pregnant elk has returned to settle a score. But how is she coming for him?  Has she reincarnated? Is she his wife, that new woman at work, someone else? He must kill the elk again before she finalizes her long running, overly complicated revenge plan.

At first, it seems like we are in Lewis’ mind as he is going insane, paranoia and disconnected thoughts making a chilling portrait of a mental breakdown that goes from instability straight to very gruesome murders. But no. This is real. The monster really is a dead cow.

One of the other friends meets his demise at Elk-Head Woman’s behest in the prologue. Lewis, however. gets an entire section of dawning awareness. The other two friends are saved for the end. They’ve built a traditional sweat lodge to mourn Lewis’ passing and, you know, the crazy murders he did first. As they sit around in the Sweat, introducing more characters that have nothing to do with anything, Elk Head woman closes in. She stops to brutally kill some dogs . . . because I guess it’s ok to kill some animals and not others . . . and then she gets ready to go head-to-head with one of the friend’s daughters . . . in a basketball game to the death.

I’m not making this stuff up. I’m not sure you could make this stuff up. Why Elk Head woman is special is never clear. The other murdered members of the herd are truly dead and have not arisen for vengeance. Was something unusual about this cow? Was it because the youths hunted on their Elders land? Was it because the carcasses were not used, and it was hunting for the sake of bloodshed? Was it because they killed so many indiscriminately? Who knows. You’ll never know, and it will never make sense why the friends instantly connect death and looming bad luck with the long-ago hunt. Sorry, revenge of the burger would not be my first thought if I found all my buddies and their dogs violently murdered.

I suppose the story could have been well done. The plot itself seems thin, but thinner plots have gone on to make us deeply care, and the topic of wanton hunting and animal abuse, plus the humanity of animals and the love they have for their offspring, is something that often gets shunted aside by the “importance” of human problems. I’m all for looking more in depth at the casual cruelty of humans towards animals and showing that animals feel just as deeply as we do. Perhaps a revenge story with an animal protagonist is desperately needed. But not this story. No animal would play basketball for revenge on a human protagonist, nor would this sainted animal avenger go on to perpetuate intense animal cruelty. Likewise, why would Elk Head Woman instantly strike one friend (a periphery friend) but leave the actual man who murdered her for years later? It seems that this animal only has enough human intelligence and emotion to act as the fluctuations of the plot need, leaving logic far, far behind.

None of it makes sense, and in between the laughable bouts of gore and sporty face offs, there is a lot of dead space, a lot of characters with strikingly stagnant arcs sitting around, chatting about inconsequential moments. No one here is likable, and we do not fear for or root for anyone. They all have it coming, and yet we’re bored as we watch them gruesomely die. Instead, we wait, breathless, for the story to finally be over so we can tell our book clubs that yes, yes, we did read it, and then break down for them all the reasons we hated every single moment. Not recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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