The Backbone of the World, by Stephen Graham Jones

Millie Two Bears, the heroine of this novelette, is a middle-aged Blackfeet woman living alone in a trailer after her husband went to jail for accidentally hitting two children with his car and killing them. She will soon have to give up her home as it's owned by his children and he won't be out of jail for another 20 years. In the interim, largely so she can have something else to think about, she gets obsessed with an invasion of prairie dogs and starts trying to get rid of them.

Meanwhile, she gets a taker for the camper that she advertised for rental months ago and then forgot about. Her renter, an Indian woman named Frog, is nice but peculiar. Extremely peculiar. The prairie dogs are also peculiar.

A lot of the fun of this story is the way Jones plays on genre tropes. I kept thinking I knew what genre the story was in, but hilariously, every time I did, the heroine would get the same idea. There are a number of iterations of this before we find out for sure.

It's a very fun story and includes one of the single most batshit images I've come across outside of other Stephen Graham Jones books.

( Read more... )

Content note: There's a lot of talk about animal harm (the plot involves trying to exterminate prairie dogs after a horse is injured stepping in a prairie dog hole), but it's questionable how much harm actually takes place.

[image error] [image error]

comments