Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones returns to the Blackfeet reservation of The Only Good Indians with its follow-up, Off the Reservation, a supernatural shocker in which the ghosts of America’s past refuse to stay buried.
Blending a breakneck road trip with Indigenous history, cultural reckoning and visceral horror, Jones sends a fractured group of Blackfeet activists on a mission to bring home the remains of a child lost to history.
Five years after the events of The Only Good Indians, Nathan Yellow Tail is struggling to rebuild his life following an accident that has left him badly injured and his best friend Sebby fighting for survival. When an opportunity arises to help Sebby and find some measure of redemption, Nate joins three older Blackfeet companions in a battered camper van bound for the site of the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Their mission is to repatriate the bones of a Blackfeet boy who died there. But something far more sinister comes back with them.
To celebrate the book’s release today, CinemaChords caught up with Jones to discuss returning to the world of The Only Good Indians, this time around dismantling the conventions of possession horror and harnessing the restless energy of a supernatural road trip, drawing on the history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and using visceral horror to explore grief, guilt and the consequences of unresolved injustice.