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Stephen Graham Jones loves knives—slashing implements of any kind, really. His first task during a recent reorganization of his desk? Figuring out where to put his “big knife.” (Right next to the computer monitor, of course.) During lunch this past December, the Boulder author whips out a blade from his belt and marvels over its Damascus titanium edge. “This is my dress knife,” Jones says.
Perhaps sharp objects serve as motivation, though less directly than they once did: As a young, struggling writer living in a Dallas suburb, Jones worked a series of warehouse jobs to pay his bills. He rarely got to his computer before 11 p.m. Exhausted, he’d often fall asleep, collapsing face-first on his desk. To stay awake, Jones gathered a few small knives and glued them around his keyboard—blades up.
Jones, who turns 53 this month, is also a shameless slasher movie buff. He drives a bright yellow truck emblazoned with Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers stickers. His office at the University of Colorado Boulder, where Jones is the Ivena Reilly Baldwin Endowed Chair of English, is filled with collectibles, including a plastic chainsaw.
He’s seen slashers you’ve never heard of—like 1982’s Girls Nite Out, in which college students are terrorized by the school’s mascot, a bear—and they still terrify him. He enjoys discussing the minutiae of each movie so much that sometimes his long-suffering wife, Nancy, will hold up her hand and demand: “OK, no more nerd talk.” That catalog of horror no doubt contributes to his facility with murder. “I’m not going to live long enough to write down all the ways I’d like to kill people,” he says.
These admissions are made even more disconcerting through the manner in which Jones delivers them. His voice is small, his demeanor reserved—like Hannibal Lecter stripped of the accent and pretension. Tall and strikingly handsome, he has long, dark hair that’s turning gray, and he favors boots and black. At a recent appearance at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, he wore a button-down with a cemetery scene on the front.
In short, if you were to guess Jones’ literary pursuits, you’d likely venture: “campy horror.” You would not be completely wrong. Jones has released 25 novels since his first was published in 2000, and the roster includes titles such as Zombie Bake-Off and It Came from Del Rio, part one of the Bunnyhead Chronicles. But you wouldn’t be completely right, either.
Between the neck-severing and the corpse-gobbling, Jones cuts deep into universal human truths. He’s won four Bram Stoker Awards, the horror genre’s top honor. His latest novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, set to be published next month, recounts the killing spree of a Blackfeet vampire following the real-life Marias Massacre of 1870. Under Jones’ direction, what sounds like a straightforward revenge fest becomes a thorny study of justice: When does vengeance end? When is the bloodbath enough?
“Here’s someone who has a totally different sort of background compared to me in terms of where we lived, who we met, who we grew up with,” says Paul Tremblay, a horror author and Jones’ friend. “But within the stories—even if they’re not pleasant stories, because a lot of them aren’t—he’s able to convey not only empathy for the characters, but there’s also an emotional integrity to his stories. They feel real.” That’s because, in many ways, they are.
A few of the more innovative scenarios that have appeared in Jones’ pages: decapitation by Cadillac, a werewolf kidnapped by an exterminator for his urine’s poisonlike properties, and cannabis plants that eat people. But that’s fiction. In the real world, Jones craves routine. What keeps him up most at night, in fact, is the prospect of dining at a new restaurant. “I do not like a menu that I have not seen,” he says. “That is the most terrifying thing.” He sticks to known quantities at chains. Last night, it was Chipotle. Today, for lunch, it’s Chipotle again.
He’s seated on the patio of the only outpost the Denver-born burrito-maker has in Boulder, a few blocks from his office at CU, where he’s worked since 2008. The venue isn’t the only constant. Jones usually orders the same entrée. Coconut shrimp at Red Lobster. Burger King? Double Whopper, plain. And here, at Chipotle, it’s chicken soft tacos.
It’s no wonder Jones seeks stability. Growing up, he lived mostly with his mom and usually near the West Texas oil town of Midland. But the family moved a lot, and not always to ideal environs. For a year in junior high, Jones stayed with his great-uncle, who raised cattle and horses. The livestock often busted through the fence and became roadkill. Jones’ great-uncle piled the carcasses near the house. After school, Jones would grab a snack and play among the bodies. “I had so much fun just taking them apart and looking at them,” he says.
During the 1980s, his mother married a man with whom they settled in Colorado Springs. Jones clashed with his stepfather, the two often threatening each other with knives and guns. To protect himself, Jones slept with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Rather than developing an aversion to violence, Jones embraced it. “He’s always got these great stories, like, ‘Hey, you know when you were a kid and you played that game where you’d stab a friend but try not to break their skin?’ ” says Tod Goldberg, a writer and former colleague. When Jones was 17 and living in Midland, an acquaintance attempted to die by suicide at Jones’ apartment. Jones and his roommates decided to pass the time waiting for the ambulance by seeing who could throw a knife closest to their own shoe. Jones speared his foot and won the wager.
These games, whether you think them amusing or gruesome, were cathartic. “I tried to valorize [violence],” Jones says. “I don’t know what the other option is. If you don’t embrace it, then you’re saying, This part of my life doesn’t matter anymore, and it seems like you’re less of a person.”
If Jones found release in risky behaviors, he discovered escape through other means: a trove of mass-market paperbacks an uncle stored in his trailer; tales of Bat Boy in The National Inquirers he read at the grocery store while his mom shopped; Michael, Freddy, and Jason movies rented by eighth graders on the sly from an obliging video clerk in Wimberly, Texas. One of his friends’ dads would wait until the kids were into their second or third slasher of the night in the garage and then scrape Freddy fingers along the metal door. “We’d blast out the side door,” Jones writes in one of his acknowledgments, “and we’d run like I’ve never run since, tears slipping back from my eyes, my mouth actually hurting because my smile was so wide, nothing but darkness yawning open in front of me. I ran into that darkness, and am still running.”
In the early 1990s, he was a student at Texas Tech University, about 120 miles from Midland, when the police pulled him from English class. His uncle had been badly burned and airlifted to the local intensive care unit. Jones sat in the hospital room for three days, becoming so bored that he wrote a ghost story. An instructor entered it into a writing competition, which Jones won. He got a $50 check. “And that was the first time I ever turned lies into groceries,” Jones says.
Jones’ debut novel, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, is a trippy road-trip saga that follows a Native American protagonist as he travels across New Mexico, encountering aliens and ghosts along the way. He followed that in 2003 with The Beautiful Sinners (about a serial killer targeting Native children) and The Bird Is Gone (a murder mystery revolving around an act of Congress that could return the Great Plains to Native Americans). All three novels differed in genre but were categorized under the same keyword: Indigenous.
Jones is Blackfeet through his father. “I grew up always being the only one like me, and in Texas, that’s not so good,” Jones says. At Thanksgiving, his elementary school teachers would ask him, the lone Native American in class, if tribes really wore feathers in their headbands. A college professor singled him out for insight into Chief Bromden, the narrator of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
There are experts in Blackfeet history: While writing The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Jones consulted a friend fluent in Blackfoot vernacular to ensure that Good Stab, the vampire, spoke like a member of the tribe would have during the 19th century. But, Jones says, most contemporary Blackfeet (like most people) read John Grisham and Danielle Steel, not tribal histories.
After his first few novels, Jones realized his book event audience had begun treating him as an authority on Native American culture, just as his teachers had. “I did not like it even a little bit,” Jones says. He made a decision to swerve hard into slashers, zombies, and werewolves, “as a way of telling all those people, I dare you to try to find the Indian stuff in this,” Jones says. At the same time, Jones tried to publish works in the vein of David Foster Wallace. “What happened was about 2006, 2007, I feel like I became two writers,” Jones says. “One was on kind of a literary track, and one was doing the schlockiest genre stuff I could think of.”
It wasn’t until 2016’s Mongrels that Jones stitched together his two halves—death dealer and artist. Ostensibly a werewolf novel, Mongrels allowed Jones to play with the frothiest of monster folklore, and the book features its share of cryptic legend, blood, and corpses de cuisine. The violence pulses, but the book’s steady heart is a lonely boy whose disconnection seems to mirror Jones’ own as a child: His family is werewolf, but he can’t become one himself. The pack moves every few months. In each new setting, some form of violence awaits.
Mongrels isn’t the only time a glint of Jones’ reality has appeared in his fiction. In My Heart Is a Chainsaw, his high-school-age heroine seeks refuge from a killer in a pile of rotting elk corpses. Jones didn’t connect with Blackfeet culture until he was 12, when his father first took him hunting on the tribe’s reservation in Montana. Consequently, to him, “going after meat is fundamentally what it means to be Blackfeet,” and he returns to hunting repeatedly when crafting Blackfeet characters.
Jones is quick to emphasize he doesn’t use writing as therapy. When struggling with his first novel, he started reaching into his memory bank for inspiration; putting himself on the page advanced the plot and proved a conduit for creating an emotional response in readers. It’s difficult to imagine, however, that dissecting himself doesn’t result in an examination of his parts. “I think Stephen witnessed a lot of stuff that needed to find some kind of expression,” says William Kuskin, the chair of CU’s English Department. “Horror is a genre container that allows him to explore that stuff.”
Although Jones developed a cult following early in his career, as of about a decade ago, he’d never risen higher than midlist. Mediocre sales weren’t entirely his fault. Horror was dead. The genre had been suffocated in the 1990s under the weight of big-name authors such as Stephen King and Clive Barker, whose successes inspired so many copycats that the category became watered down with dreck. Eventually, King et al. moved to the mainstream fiction aisle, and horror sales plummeted. Readers avoided the genre so completely that publishers rechristened new titles as either dark fantasy or supernatural suspense.
That began to change in the 2010s—first in cinema, where production house A24 started releasing a canon of horrifying yet remarkably acted art-house horror movies, such as The Witch and Midsommar. Then, in 2017, Jordan Peele’s Get Out earned more than $200 million at the box office, its message of racial appropriation wrapped in a body-snatching narrative.
Joe Monti, an editor at Saga Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster), was among those who flocked to Get Out. When he left the theater, Monti decided he needed to amplify marginalized voices. America was confronting difficult topics, he says, and the genre had long been a vehicle for conversations about race, class, and culture. (Vulture’s “30 Great Eat-The-Rich Horror Movies” begins with 1962’s El Angel Exterminador, about wealthy partygoers trapped in “their palace of excess.”) Not only is it cathartic, but while science fiction and fantasy are often divorced from reality, horror at its most frightening is tethered to it. At long last, horror books were poised to rise from the grave.
Jones, meanwhile, was determined to write a Three’s Company novel. (He’s a big fan of Jack Tripper.) When a lawyer told him he couldn’t—it was, you know, copyrighted—Jones suggested a Friday the 13th book. Same problem. But for this one, Jones thought of a work-around. Instead of Jason Voorhees’ hockey mask, his monster would wear an elk head. Rather than being set in Crystal Lake, Jones’ story would emanate from the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. As usual, Jones wove his own life into the narrative: The monster seeks revenge for a crime committed by four teenagers while they were hunting on the reservation.
Monti received the manuscript in 2019. It was emotional and challenging, and—because it’s Jones—described in one scene a man cutting an elk calf from his wife’s stomach. Monti bought the novel a week later, and The Only Good Indians became a surprise bestseller in 2020. It earned a spot on Time’s must-read books of the year list and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Horror books written by white authors released around the same time did not perform as well. Monti chalks that up to Good Indians’ perspective on the Native American experience. Whether he liked it or not, the literary world had again cast Jones not as an author, but as a Native American author.
On the Chipotle patio, his tacos long since devoured, Jones folds his Damascus titanium blade into its handle and clips it onto his belt. “Man, I love this knife,” he says. He doesn’t get much opportunity to clean kills these days, though. Ever since Good Indians came out, his autumns—hunting season—have become packed with book events. He’s a popular draw in October because of Halloween and in November because it’s Native American History Month.
Being typecast doesn’t bother him anymore. Jones revels in the opportunity to challenge assumptions about what it means to be Native American. On panels, audiences might expect him to expound on the history of Indigenous rights. Instead, he talks about Jason Voorhees.
In much the same way, the publishing world expected Jones to follow Good Indians with something similar—something inherently “Indian.” So, he wrote a slasher trilogy. The first book in the series, 2021’s My Heart is a Chainsaw, centers on Jade, a high-school horror-movie obsessive who believes a slasher like Jason has come to her town. She’s ecstatic by their arrival—likely because the mounting deaths distract from her personal trauma of parental neglect and abuse. Yes, Jade is Blackfeet, but, as Jones writes in the acknowledgments, her heritage (much like the author’s) is incidental, not instrumental, to the novel. Chainsaw won Jones his fourth Bram Stoker Award.
Now, five books after Good Indians (he also squeezed in the standalone novels The Babysitter Lives and I Was a Teenage Slasher), Jones is publishing The Buffalo Hunter Hunter next month. Told through the journal entries of a minister, Buffalo Hunter recounts the pastor’s conversations with a Blackfeet named Good Stab—who arrives in town just as skinned bodies, drained of their blood, begin turning up nearby. Jones did little to research the minister. “I made it up,” he says. But in addition to consulting his friend on the finer points of the Blackfoot language, Jones also read Beneath the Backbone of the World, a history of the tribe, and consulted primary letters and documents surrounding the Marias Massacre, during which the U.S. Army killed almost 200 people.
Jones concedes these elements make The Buffalo Hunter Hunter instrumentally Native American—what people wanted after Good Indians. But he says readers shouldn’t see the novel as a harbinger of things to come, or as some sort of evolution in a journey of self-discovery. In I Was a Teenage Slasher, a Blackfeet character says everything she owns is Indian, because she is Indian. “That’s the way I feel about my books,” Jones says. He’ll go wherever the darkness takes him.
On this early winter afternoon, that’s to the movies. Jones’ Friday is wide open—no classes, no weekend book events to prepare for—and Werewolves, a new dystopian horror movie described in at least one review as “cheesy, but in a fun way,” is playing nearby. If he runs, Jones can make the matinee.
Read More: Colorado Horror Writer Stephen Graham Jones Is Back With a Killer Follow-Up