The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion ed. by Billy J. Stratton (review)

Twenty years ago, as a PhD candidate in Florida State University’s creative writing program, Stephen Graham Jones was not labeled a Native American writer. As a fellow student, I knew him as a Thomas Pynchon-grade postmodernist. When he unveiled, in workshops, brilliant portions of what would become his first novel, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (2000), his classmates and I anticipated him joining the ranks of elite writers such as David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and Salman Rushdie. Eventually, when we learned of Jones’s Blackfeet background, we encouraged him to tether his experimental style to the subject matter of cultural identity. Instead, after watching the post-slasher flick Scream (1996), Jones announced that he had seen the future of storytelling and pivoted to writing werewolf stories.

Jones’s refusal to cater to expectations accounts for his dissonant yet intriguing presence in American letters. The difficulty in categorizing his work is part of its charm, and a new critical companion edited by Billy J. Stratton aims to introduce Jones to new readers, guiding them “in their journeys through the cartographical strata of Stephen’s storied territory” (12). The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion is a passionate—if at times fandom-level—collection of essays and an interview that enhances the author’s mystery and allure even as it strives to pinpoint what makes his texts so engaging.

The companion opens with Jones’s own “Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer—and Maybe to Myself,” printed here for the first time. In this address (penned for a 2015 keynote address for the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA writing program), Jones urges young writers—and reminds himself—to eschew the limitations of identity politics:

Don’t be an elf. That’s what America wants you to be. Elves are liminal beings. They live close to the spiritual source. They commune with nature. They’re stewards of the trees. They belong in the forests. They cry because of Dr. Pepper bottles in the creek. Also, as it turns out, they’re made up, they’re not real. If you’re an elf, you don’t exist, and like that, America’s won.

(xi)

This controversial essay sets the tone for what follows, including Stratton’s extensive interview, “Observations on the Shadow Self,” in which readers learn how the novels of Bret Easton Ellis inspired Jones to write his crime novel Growing Up Dead in Texas (2012) in just thirteen weeks, and in which we are treated to a photo of Jones in full-on Walking Dead makeup at the 2013 Denver Comic Con. Such quirkiness is balanced with serious appraisals of influences. For instance, Jones describes the impact of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick on his own work, stating, “That sincere telling . . it’s what I’m always aiming for, what I’m always wanting to do” (25).

It is this sincerity of expression that Frances Washburn addresses in “Stephen Graham Jones’ Cosmopolitan Literary Aesthetic,” an essay that unpacks the many postmodern references and paratextual inventions layered in works such as the acclaimed Demon Theory (2006), a book that helped create the genre of “intellectual horror.” Jones’s first serious attempt at writing a postmodern murder mystery, The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto (2003), also earns close examination from two scholars. Birgit Däwes provides a long overdue analysis of The Bird Is Gone, drawing on critical theory and post-structuralism, while John Blair Gamber takes a historical approach in his essay, “The Law of the Land: Legal Allusion in The Bird Is Gone.” In the final essay of part 1, Kristina Baudemann deftly applies Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor’s term “shadow survivance” to Jones’s supernatural crime novel Ledfeather (2008).

The companion’s second part (“Writing at the Margins”) offers fascinating discussions of Jones’s work in relation to reservation basketball (David Buchanan’s...