The author had deftly problematized it by making a group of Native Americans responsible for this unholy massacre of the elk. Interestingly, this book parallels this ‘massacre’ of Native Americans at the hands of white colonial settlers to the massacre of a herd of peaceful, un-armed elk. It seemed like an excellent premise to a horror story - a pregnant elk haunting her murderers sounds fascinating.īut I only slowly realized how this was a foil, a subtle way the author made us think and ponder and then arrive at the realization that this massacre was exactly how Colonial settlers and White men committed crimes on entire Native American tribal communities. In this book, it is a group of Native American men who massacre a herd of innocent (and unarmed) elk, one among which was pregnant. But more importantly, it did so using an unorthodox take. What I did not expect was how it subtly pointed to the years and years of systematic oppression of the Native Americans. And last, I did know (albeit vaguely) about the continuous and systematic subjugation that Native Americans have been facing over the centuries.Īll of it seemed enough to me, and I happily and eagerly dived right in. Thirdly, it was written in the horror genre instead of magical realism, which is the go-to when it comes to telling stories of any indigenous culture. Secondly, I had happily claimed it as one of my most anticipated reads of 2020, but it was already half past 2021, and I still hadn’t read it. Firstly, I already had an audiobook of it. The reason I did so was actually a series of events. Recently, I decided to pick Stephen Graham Jones’ novel The Only Good Indians as my book of choice for a project.

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