JONES: You know, I think the reason elk matter to me, it's - whenever I take an elk or I'm part of a hunting party that takes an elk, I feel like there's an ethical obligation to that animal to treat it with respect. SHAPIRO: What made you want to center this around the spirit of the elk? And that, to me, is no way to be part of a community, of course. JONES: I think - I mean, you're basically taking food off of elders' plates. SHAPIRO: So what is it about this trespass of hunting elk in the section that is reserved for the elders and shooting more elk than you need that you think makes such a powerful, instigating event? And they sneak into the elder section and shoot a lot more elk than they need. And they sneak into the elder section, which is saved for, you know, the elders of the tribe to hunt so they can have access to easier elk. JONES: These four hunters - these four elk hunters on the last day of their elk hunt, they kind of consider that all bets are off. SHAPIRO: Tell us about that initial trespass. Yeah, these guys overstep their boundaries. SHAPIRO: Except in this book, there's a very clear way to be a bad one, and it results in this horror story of, like, vengeance, right? There are 7 million ways to be a good Indian. JONES: I wanted to interrogate what it means to even be a good Indian in 2020, you know? Does it mean, you know, subscribing old ways? Does it mean adopting other ways? How do you navigate the world when success in one arena is failure in another? And turns out, there's not a single way to be a good Indian. I began by asking Stephen Graham Jones about the title, why he wanted to explore the idea of good Indians. SHAPIRO: Jones is a member of the Blackfeet Nation, and in this book, a group of friends violates a tradition on the reservation and a vengeful spirit haunts them to the bloody end. But it was kind of the bumper sticker that would have been on horses if horses had bumper stickers back then.

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: The only good Indians are dead Indians from - you know, as ascribed to Teddy Roosevelt back in the 19th century. Stephen Graham Jones writes horror novels, and his latest starts with a provocative reworking of an old saying.

The good indians