Stephen Graham Jones Books In Order

It Came from Del Rio

There are borders and then there are borders. Between right and wrong. Between Texas and Mexico. The first is a joke to Dodd Raines, the second a payday. Then there’s the borders he’s made. Between himself and his estranged daughter, the border patrol agent. Between himself and his one-time employers. And there’s another border, one he cares about even less than the Rio Grande: the border between life and death. Used to, the shadow Dodd Raines cast when he stood dripping from that water – it was the shadow of a fugitive. But now that fugitive’s coming home, and the shadow he’s casting? It’s got rabbit ears. Listen, you can hear the chupacabras padding along beside him – their new master. He’s that big guy in the hood, slouching out by the gas pumps. Walking north, for justice. Austin’s never seen anything like Dodd Raines, and never will again. Get ready.

The Fast Red Road

The Fast Red Road A Plainsong is a gleeful, two fisted plundering of the myth and pop culture surrounding the American Indian. It is a novel fueled on pot fumes and blues, a surreal pseudo Western, in which imitation is the sincerest form of subversion. Indians, cowboys, and outlaws are as changeable as their outfits; horses are traded for Trans Ams, and men are as likely to strike poses from Gunsmoke as they are from Custer’s last stand. Pidgin, the half blood protagonist, inhabits a world of illusion of aliens, ghosts, telekinesis, and water pistol violence, where TV and po*rn offer redemption, and the Indian always gets it in the end. His attempts to reconcile the death of his father with five hundred years of colonial myth making lead him to criss cross a wasted New Mexico, returning compulsively to his hometown of Clovis, the site of his father’s burial.

Accompanied by car thief Charlie Ward, he evades the cops in a top down drag race, tearing through barriers ‘Dukestyle.’ The land they travel seems bent with fever post apocalyptic as though the end has arrived and no one noticed. Its occupants hawk bodies and pastel bomb shelters, wandering a bleak hallucination of strip joints, strip malls, and all you can eat beef fed beef stalls. They speak a lingo of disposable nicknames, truncated punch lines slang with an expiration date. Pidgin strays through bar and junkyards, rodeos and carnivals, encountering the remnants of the Goliard tribe. There’s the mysterious Mexican Paiute, Uncle Birdfinger, checkout girl Stiya 6 the reincarnation of Pidgin’s mother and media queen Psychic Sally, who predicts the group’s demise. Each plays a part in the search that will eventually place Pidgin in a position to rewrite history.

Jones delivers his stunning epic in violent, palpable prose, rendering a dark yet recognizable vision. The Fast Red Road blazes a trail through the puppets and mirrors of myth, meeting the unexpected at every turn, and proving that the past the texture of the road can and must be changed.

The Bird is Gone

Imagine a world where the American government signed a conservation act to ‘restore all indigenous flora and fauna to the Great Plains,’ which means suddenly the Great Plains are Indian again. Now fast forward fourteen years to a bowling alley deep in the Indian Territories. People that bowling alley with characters named LP Deal, Cat Stand, Mary Boy, Courtney Peltdowne, Back Iron, Denim Horse, Naitche, and give them a chance to find a treaty signed under duress by General Sherman, which effectively gives all of the Americas back to the Indians, only hide that treaty in a stolen pipe, put it in a locker, and flush the key down the toilet. Ask LP Deal and the rest what they will trade to get that key back maybe, everything.

All the Beautiful Sinners

Nazareth, Texas Deputy Sheriff Jim Doe plunges into a renegade manhunt after the town’s sheriff is gunned down. But unbeknownst to him, the suspect an American Indian holds chilling connections to the disappearance of Doe s sister years before. And the closer Doe gets to the fugitive s trail, the more he realizes that his own involvement in the case is hardly coincidental. A descendant of the Blackfeet Nation himself, Doe keeps getting mistaken for the killer he s chasing. And when the FBI s finest three profilers descend on the case, Doe suspects the hunt has only just begun. But beneath the novel s pyrotechnic plotting, the deeper psychic cadences of Stephen Graham Jones s prose take hold. His specific imagery and telling detail coalesce into the literary equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting. But like the other seminal works in the genre Fight Club, Red Dragon, All the Beautiful Sinners will unnerve you, and it will then send you back to page one to experience its mysteries all over again.

Demon Theory

On Halloween night, following an unnerving phone call from his diabetic mother, Hale and six of his med school classmates return to the house where his sister disappeared years ago. And while there’s no sign of his mother, something is waiting for them there, has been waiting a long time. Written as a literary film treatment littered with footnotes like breadcrumbs, Demon Theory is even parts camp and terror, combining glib dialogue, fascinating pop culture references and an intricate subtext as it pursues the events of a haunting movie trilogy too real to dismiss. When it was released in December 1996, Scream, in the words of director John Carpenter, recast horror for a very cynical, postmodern generation of young kids, thus revitalizing a genre that had nearly become obsolete. Since then, movie audiences have whole heartedly embraced the intelligent horror movies that pay homage to Scream including The Sixth Sense, The Ring, and, most recently The Grudge and a similar phenomenon has emerged among book readers, as evidenced by the success of House of Leaves and Neil Gaiman s eerie graphic novels. Stephen Graham Jones Demon Theory is a refreshing and occasionally shocking addition to this growing tradition. There are movies about books and books about movies, and there s Demon Theory, that one finger of light from the back of the auditorium, pointing simply up. The pages are stained with popcorn, yes, but something darker too, something you can t wash away.

The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti

Fiction. If there’s a line between the real and the digital, between meat and the game, between past and present, then hold this book close to your mouth and whisper it into the pages. Please. Maybe the kid in there’ll hear you. His name is Nolan Dugatti. He’s lost, see, running down hall after hall, something both ancient and not yet born galloping up behind him on a hundred legs, each individual footfall a sound he knows, a way of shuffling that he’s always known. His father? Except it can’t be. Unless of course this is another novel from Stephen Graham Jones. Not quite horror, not quite science fiction, but like his five or six other books, a story trembling at some pupal stage between meat and the game, where words will sometimes stop their crawl across the page and crane their neck around at the sky, nod about what they see there you then unfold their wings, drift up into another world altogether.

Ledfeather

After burning up the blacktop in New Mexico with The Fast Red Road and rewriting Indian history on the Great Plains with The Bird is Gone, Stephen Graham Jones now takes us to Montana. Set on a Blackfeet Indian reservation, the life of one Indian boy, Doby Saxon, is laid bare through the eyes of those who witness it: his near death experience, his suicide attempts, his brief glimpse of victory, and the unnecessary death of one of his best friends. But through Doby there emerges a connection to the past, to an Indian Agent who served the United States Government over a century before. This revelation leads to another and another until it becomes clear that the decisions of this single Indian Agent have impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet Indians. And the life of Doby Saxon, a boy standing in the middle of the road at night, his hands balled into fists, the reservation wheeling all around him like the whole of Blackfeet history hurtling towards him. Jones’s beautifully complex novel is a story of life, death, love, and the ties that bind us not only to what has been, but what will be: the power of one moment, the weight of one decision, the inevitability of one outcome, and the price of one life.

Bleed into Me

We stare at each other because we don’t know which tribe, and then nod at the last possible instant. Standard procedure. You pick it up the first time a white friend leads you across a room just to stand you up by another Indian, arrange you like furniture, like you should have something to say to each other. As one character after another tells it in these stories, much that happens to them does so because ‘I’m an Indian.’ And, as Stephen Graham Jones tells it in one remarkable story after another, the life of an Indian in modern America is as rich in irony as it is in tradition. A noted Blackfeet writer, Jones offers a nuanced and often biting look at the lives of Native peoples from the inside. A young Indian mans journey to discover America results in an unsettling understanding of relations between whites and Natives in the twenty first century, a relationship still fueled by mistrust, stereotypes, and almost casual violence. A character waterproofs his boots with transmission fluid; another steals into Glacier National Park to hunt. One man uses watermelon to draw flies off poached deer; another, in a modern twist on the captivity narrative, kidnaps a white girl in a pickup truck; and a son bleeds into the father carrying him home. Rife with arresting and poignant images, fleeting and daring in presentation, weighty and provocative in their messages, these stories demonstrate the power of one of the most compelling writers in Native North America today.

The Ones That Got Away

These thirteen stories are our own lives, inside out. A boy’s summer romance doesn’t end in that good kind of heartbreak, but in blood. A girl on a fishing trip makes a friend in the woods who’s exactly what she needs, except then that friend follows her back to the city. A father hears a voice through his baby monitor that shouldn’t be possible, but now he can’t stop listening. A woman finds out that the shipwreck wasn’t the disaster, but who she’s shipwrecked with. A big brother learns just what he will, and won’t, trade for one night of sleep. From prison guards making unholy alliances to snake oil men in the Old West doling out justice, these stories carve down into the body of the mind, into our most base fears and certainties, and there’s no anesthetic. Turn the light on if you want, but that just makes for more shadows.

The Bone Key (By:Sarah Monette)

The dead and the monstrous will not leave Kyle Murchison Booth alone, for an unwilling foray into necromancy has made him sensitive to and attractive to the creatures who roam the darkness of his once safe world. Ghosts, ghouls, incubi: all have one thing in common. They know Booth for one of their own…

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume One

An Air Force Loadmaster is menaced by strange sounds within his cargo; a man is asked to track down a childhood friend…
who died years earlier; doomed pioneers forge a path westward as a young mother discovers her true nature; an alcoholic strikes a dangerous bargain with a gregarious stranger; urban explorers delve into a ruined book depository, finding more than they anticipated; residents of a rural Wisconsin town defend against a legendary monster; a woman wracked by survivor’s guilt is haunted by the ghosts of a tragic crash; a detective strives to solve the mystery of a dismembered girl; an orphan returns to a wicked witch’s candy house; a group of smugglers find themselves buried to the necks in sand; an unanticipated guest brings doom to a high class party; a teacher attempts to lead his students to safety as the world comes to an end around them…
What frightens us, what unnerves us? What causes that delicious shiver of fear to travel the lengths of our spines? It seems the answer changes every year. Every year the bar is raised; the screw is tightened. Ellen Datlow knows what scares us; the twenty one stories and poems included in this anthology were chosen from magazines, webzines, anthologies, literary journals, and single author collections to represent the best horror of the year. Legendary editor Ellen Datlow Poe: New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, winner of multiple Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy awards, joins Night Shade Books in presenting The Best Horror of the Year, Volume One.

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Two

Legendary editor Ellen Datlow, winner of multiple Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy awards, joins Night Shade Books in presenting The Best Horror of the Year Volume 2.

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Three

What frightens us? What unnerves us? What causes that delicious shiver of fear to travel the lengths of our spines? It seems the answer changes every year. Every year the bar is raised; the screw, tightened. Ellen Datlow knows what scares us; the nineteen stories included in this anthology were chosen from magazines, webzines, anthologies, literary journals, and single author collections to represent the best horror of the year.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Twentieth Annual Collection

For twenty years this award winning compilation has been the nonpareil benchmark against which all other annual fantasy and horror collections are judged. Directed first by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and for the past four years by Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant, it consistently presents the strangest, the funniest, the darkest, the sharpest, the most original in short, the best fantasy and horror. The current collection, marking a score of years, offers more than forty stories and poems from almost as many sources. Summations of the field by the editors are complemented by articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint and Jeff VanderMeer highlighting the best of the fantastic in, respectively, media, music and comics as well as honorable mentions notable works that didn t quite make the cut but are nonetheless worthy of attention. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: 20th Annual Collection is a cornucopia of fantastic delights, an unparalleled resource and indispensable reference that captures the unique excitement and beauty of the fantastic in all its gloriously diverse forms, from the lightest fantasy to the darkest horror.

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2010

Darkness surrounds us. We can find darkness anywhere: in a strange green stone etched with mysterious symbols; at a small town’s annual picnic; in a ghostly house that is easy to enter but not so easy to leave; behind the dumpster in the alley where a harpy lives; in The Nowhere, a place where car keys, toys, people disappear to; among Polar explorers; and, most definitely, within ourselves. Darkness flies from mysterious crates; surrounds children whose nightlights have vanished; and flickers between us at the movie theater. Darkness crawls from the past and is waiting in our future; and there’s always a chance that Halloween really is a door opening directly into endless shadow. Welcome to the dark. You may never want to leave. This inaugural volume of the year’s best dark fantasy and horror features more than 500 pages of dark tales from some of today’s finest writers of the fantastique. Chosen from a variety of sources, these stories are as eclectic and varied as the genre itself.