Stephen Graham Jones (SGJ) “…leaves fingerprints all over his work. You know you’re reading an SGJ story if it’s coming-of-age, the main theme is identity, and you feel crushed under the weight of your emotions.”
– Sadie Hartman, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered.
Yeah, I’m back, bitches. My hair’s different, I’m older, less eyeliner, and this isn’t exactly the outfit I would have picked, but I’m still that same pissed-off girl, her hands balled into fists.
Which is how you talk when you’re sort of scared, I know. And when you’re not actually saying it out loud, either.
… no amount of damage done to someone erases what they’ve done to you. All it does, really, is complicate your life going forward, as now you’ve got charges to deal with, or a body to hide. But you’ve still got the same trauma. Just, now you’ve pulled some more trauma over on top of it.
From The Angel of Indian Lake:
Hettie and Paul, are missing, as is Hettie’s little brother, Jan. The townspeople of Proofrock, Idaho tentatively assume Hettie and Paul are driving Jan to his estranged father’s home. After all, it couldn’t be starting again, right? Proofrock’s been through so much. It couldn’t become another Independence Day, 2015, or Christmas Day, 2019, could it? But Hettie and Paul are high school students, and it always starts with high school students, and Halloween is just a day away.
Hettie and Paul’s history teacher, well aware of Proofrock’s distant past and intimately involved in its recent past, is less sanguine. Jennifer “Jade” Daniels recently returned after a prison stint, and in spite of objections from the principal, is now the high school history teacher, trying to live up to her teacher, mentor and father-figure, Grady Holmes, and she’s on edge. She survived Stacy Graves and Dark Mill South, but the signs are not looking good for Halloween, 2023.
Along for the ride this time is Lemmy Singleton, like Hettie and Paul, another of Jade’s students, and his mother Lana, both survivors of the massacre at Terra Nova on Independence Day, 2015. Then there’s Banner, the new sheriff since the disappearance of the previous sheriff, Rex Allan. And there’s Banner’s wife, Letha, heiress to her father’s media empire, the friend Jade has always needed, the final girl Jade has always wanted to be, currently away and expected back any time.
But everything is complicated by yet another fire in the national forest across the lake from Proofrock, threatening Lana Singleton’s project of resurrecting of Terra Nova. To hold off the fire, she offers to pay townsfolk willing to cross the lake and create fire breaks, even supplying them with axes and chainsaws. Jade knows there’s nothing to worry about there. No, nothing to worry about untrained townsfolk wielding axes and chainsaws, in a slasher movie scenario when the lake is maybe giving up its dead and there’s, maybe, yet another, unknown human threat.
This is a fine ending to Graham’s trilogy, and I have a couple of thoughts on the Indian Lake Trilogy as a whole:
From the late 1970s into the 1990s, many of the writers trying to emulate Stephen King seemed to focus on the surface level of his stories. There were exceptions like Peter Straub, but many of those King influenced writers only offered cardboard characters and second-hand scares as a kind of horror novel assembly line developed (see Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix).
The generation of writers who came of age as or after the boom ended, like Graham Jones, appear to have internalized the lessons to be learned from King’s story construction, pacing, characterization and context. They include writers of color who have added something: You can see it in Erika T. Wurth’s White Horse, Tananarive Due’s The Good House, and Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians, stories imbued with their own life experience. In Graham Jones’ case, his experiences as a member of the Native American (Blackfeet) community. As a constructor of plots threaded through with social observation and critique, Graham Jones is a wonder, and more so in this trilogy in that he also performs the seemingly impossible task of drawing from slasher movies thematic resonances that enrich his narrative, all contained in prose that whisks the reader along while letting us know what’s in the head – and heart – of Jade Daniels. Like The Only Good Indians, this trilogy is a heady performance, a major work in horror fiction, made more remarkable by the creation and maturation of Jade who, in spite of massive amounts of self-doubt, may well be looked back upon as an iconic heroine in 21st century horror fiction.
THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE by Stephen Graham Jones
(Indian Lake Trilogy #3)
Review by Randy Money
