Off the Reservation by Stephen Graham Jones
Release Date: 10/13/2026
Published by: Simon & Schuster/ Saga Press
Over the past few years, Stephen Graham Jones has become a “must-read” author for me whenever one of his new novels comes out. So I was definitely looking forward to Off the Reservation, the sequel to Jones’ 2020 novel, The Only Good Indians.
Although billed as a sequel and featuring one of the main characters of The Only Good Indians, Off the Reservation very much stands as its own novel and doesn’t require one to pick up the novel that came before it (although I would highly recommend it. It’s a great book.)
Off the Reservation focuses on Nate Yellow Tail, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe, who embarks on a journey with three older Blackfeet to “set his life back into balance” in hopes of saving the life of his friend, Sebby, after both were injured in a car accident. To do this, they must repatriate the bones of the only Blackfeet child to be killed at the infamous Carlisle Indian School to their rightful home on the Blackfeet reservation. Of course, because this is a horror novel, something sinister is waiting with the bones and things go awry from there.
Though I am a fan of Jones and his work (last year’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter was one of my tops books of the year), I have to admit I struggled a lot with this novel. It takes a really long time to get going and I spent a lot of the book wondering exactly when the horror was going to begin and rereading paragraphs to understand what exactly was going on. Jones has a very unique and artful writing style that seems to be even more present here than in past works and sometimes his wording in this book made it a little hard to focus and keep track of what was happening.
Not helping this was the fact that, once you get down to it, not a lot actually is happening. This is mostly a road novel, with the four main characters spending most of their time together in an RV thinking, talking, stopping for beef jerky and slushies and not much else. There’s a lot of talk about needing the bones of the Blackfeet boy, what it means that Nate committed a crime against a Blackfeet family, and several incidents of high strangeness that don’t seem to have much bearing on the plot.
Once the bones are dug up and everyone is back in the RV heading home, it’s finally made clear that this is a possession novel, and some of the most unnerving stuff in the book starts to happen. But this is over halfway through at this point and even once it starts to happen it takes a while to get ramped up, so all of the most interesting, scary and exciting stuff only happens in the last third or so of the book. And a lot of it still isn’t entirely clear. There’s an entire jarring section where Nate is having a very vivid hallucination involving his dead father and a hunting trip, but I never quite caught what it was supposed to mean and how it connected to the rest of the story.
I love Jones as a writer, and I love how his novels are about being Native American and that culture. I’m a big fan of reading stuff that’s from a perspective other than my own. I’ve said a lot on my podcast, 2 Broke Geeks, that I’m tired of stories by cis-het-white-men about cis-het-white-men. I’m one of them. I know what it’s like to be that. And all I’ve ever mostly seen is that story told over and over again. And it’s boring as hell at this point. So getting to take in the worldview and stories that Jones creates is refreshing. But in this novel, I’m not entirely sure I got what he was laying down. I could feel myself knowing that all of this meant something, but I never found myself understanding what.
I’ve never found myself having trouble keeping up with a novel of Jones’ in the past, so I’m inclined to say the fault does indeed lie with this story, which I found disjointed, slow and clunky. But I also know the fault could lie with me. Sometimes a novel needs more than one read to click. Sometimes we all find ourselves not in the headspace for the book we are reading. But I can’t deny that, of all the books by Jones I have read so far (and it’s not all of them quite yet, he’s very prolific and has been for years) this one was by far my least enjoyable read. I found it a little overly complex and somehow slightly underbaked at the same time, full of ideas that didn’t seem to go places. It’s hard for me to recommend this one, but, as always, I’m also a believer that every book is for someone but no book is for everyone, so even though it wasn’t for me, it still may be for you.