Lewis, Gabe, Cass and Ricky are four friends. They’re Native Americans of the Blackfeet tribe and were raised on a reservation. One day they go out on an illegal elk hunt and slaughter a large number of elk. This is an event that will haunt them, quite literally.
Ten years later and something is haunting the quad. A spirit – a woman with an elk head – and it wants revenge. Ricky is the first. In a prologue, he is attacked in the car park of a bar and tries to defend himself with a wrench, damaging several trucks in the process. In modern America, Native Americans face racial violence, and when the elk woman vanishes, he faces the wrath of the truckers who beat him to death.
The elk woman now stalks the other three and where this book excels is how the author shows it slowly driving them mad. Without giving spoilers, the most shocking and compelling part of the novel for me is the part which deals with Lewis. He’s escaped the reservation and is married to a white woman. But is she the elk woman? Has it possessed her? Or perhaps it’s the crow Indian who he works with and who flirts with him?
Later the vengeful spirit pursues the last of the two, Gabe and Cass. Both have moved on with their lives, Cass having settled down with a woman he hopes to marry and Gabe with a daughter who’s a talented basketball player. The reader knows that the elk spirit will try to kill the men, but the tension is heightened by who she might take down with them.
This is a fantastically written novel and as well as horror, it examines the Native American experience. The author, Stephen Graham Jones, is himself a Blackfeet Native American and it comes across, this being a novel written with real heart. This is the first novel by the author I’ve read, but certainly won’t be my last.
4 out of 5 stars
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