If the only good Indian is a dead one, then she’s going to be the worst Indian ever.

Ten years ago, four young men shot some elk then went on with their lives. It happens every year; it’s been happening forever; it’s the way it’s always been. But this time it’s different. Ten years after that fateful hunt, these men are being stalked themselves. Soaked with a powerful gothic atmosphere, the endless expanses of the landscape press down on these men – and their children – as the ferocious spirit comes for them one at a time.

Holy hell, this book was good. It slowly drifts from one story, to another with more characters, to another with even more details. You don’t have one person surviving from the start of the book to the finish.

“You’re thinking crazy,” he tells himself, just to hear it out loud. He’s right, though. These are the kind of wrong thoughts people have who are spending too much time alone. They start unpacking vast cosmic bullshit from gum wrappers, and then they chew it up, blow a bubble, ride that bubble up into some even stupider place.
Elk are just elk, simple as that. If animals came back to haunt the people who shot them, then the old-time Blackfeet would have had ghost buffalo so thick in camp they couldn’t even walk around, probably.
But they killed them fair and square, Lewis hears, and in Shaney’s voice, he thinks. Probably because he’s reading her writing.

Written as a cautionary tale, the story unfolds in the present, offering just a small and painful glimpse in the past as to what is causing today’s events.

Lewis and his buddies ran rampage in an Elk herd and killed 9 bucks and a doe who happened to be pregnant and due. He feels remorse and guilt over what happened and as the anniversary draws near, he is starting to show signs of mental distress. He has visions, he is paranoid, his dog nearly dies by asphyxiation and then has his head caved in with boots. Who’s the bad guy? Is there really a haunting in the house?

My money was on Lewis having had cranial damage from looking through the scope too close, too many concussions. But then – his then wife “births” an elk. Well, she doesn’t quite “birth” it more has it cut out of her after he watched her fall and didn’t help. He kills a Crow woman by scalping her on the Harley he was working on… That was brutal to read and I had to take small breaks.

It takes maybe half a second for those chrome spokes to grab her long spiral curls, crank her head both up and to the side, her neck obviously cracking. But her hair’s still pulling, still winding into the spinning spokes, the flickering spokes. An instant after her neck breaks, the top of her head scalps off and her forehead tilts loosely down into the rear wheel, the spokes shearing skull as easy as anything, carving down into the pulpy-warm outside of her brain. It’s greyish pink where it’s been opened, and kind of covered with a pale sheath all around that, the blood just now seeping into the folds and crevices.
Lewis backs off the throttle, lets the starter wires go.

It sounds crazy, right? Elk came back to haunt him.

No, for once in his life he’s going to be smart about a thing. And he’s not even really a killer, since she wasn’t even really a person, right? She was just an elk he shot ten years ago Saturday. One who didn’t know she was already dead.

But then the story shifts and twists and we’re looking through the eyes of the woman elk, rebirthed. We hear her voice and her quest for revenge. The pain of loosing her baby calf, the pain of having been shot in the back and also in the head – twice.

Death is too easy. Better to make every moment of the rest of a person’s life agony.

The story shifts again as we see Lewis shot and killed and the revenge doe heading back to the reservation to claim the lives of everyone who shot at her and her heard that day and stops for no-one. She kills the sheriff and manipulates the two remaining indians into killing each other – murder suicide. The last thing she wants to do is kill Denorah – the cub of one of her shooters – to make things fair.

The elk woman and Denorah play a galactic game of basketball, where the winner walks out alive. Denorah nearly wins – but the elk woman, going mad with rage, starts attacking her so the game is never finished.

I won’t spoil the ending but it’s something like “It Follows” if you’ve ever seen the movie and there’s a bit of peace at the end.

Just wanted to say wow. I’ve never read anything like this and while it was gross at times, it was somehow a satisfying revenge tale, peppered with facts about the reservation indians, their issues, the racism around them, the tribe and the rites of passage. It was a horror book but somehow it was a little bit more than that too.

Killing a calf is the worst of the worst, you know.
Beside it, breaking a promise is nothing, really.
Nothing at all.