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Stephen Graham Jones slays. There's just no other way to describe his work. The horror novelist has been making waves over the past few years with his reinvention of familiar horror tropes and sub-genres, leaving fresh wounds in his wake. From his masterful prose, to his lifelike characters, to his spellbinding brushes with the supernatural, Stephen Graham Jones is one of the greatest horror writers of his generation. Jones is a Blackfeet Native American writer whose work examines the horror in the lives of those living within the margins of society. If you're a horror fan, chances are you're familiar with the tired "Indian Burial Ground" trope, that envisions Indigenous people in North America as a bygone group haunting settlers in contemporary times. Jones's work often confronts the racist legacy of American horror by slyly subverting stereotypes about Native Americans. Horror is a genre that's powered on the breaking of boundaries to uncover something new about the human psyche, and Jones accomplishes that in just about everything he writes. 

Before his upcoming novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter comes out on March 18, 2025, here are our picks for the Stephen Graham Jones novels you've got to add to your TBR pile now. 

Popverse Picks: The Only Good Indians

The Only Good Indians is about a group of four Blackfeet men who are haunted by a brutal transgression they committed in their youth. If that isn't enough, they're also grappling with their own ambivalence towards their heritage, trying to make meaning out of being Indigenous in today's world. Without giving too much away, The Only Good Indians is a revenge story unlike anything you've read before. 

My introduction to Stephen Graham Jones's work was with the 2020 novel, The Only Good Indians. I read it one go, and felt like I had been electrocuted after I finished it. The colors of the world looked different. Jones's ability to put the intangible into plain language is astonishing, and it's a knockout of an introduction to his work. 

Popverse Picks: I Was A Teenage Slasher

Stephen Graham Jones has a lot of love for the slasher sub-genre. And while I'm not a huge slasher person, mostly because of how repetitive it is, Jones has continuously reinvented slasher stories across his career. He makes the original Scream look like child's play.  

I Was A Teenage Slasher is one of Jones's takes on the sub-genre, and it revolves around a seventeen year-old white boy in West Texas named Tolly, and his Native best friend, Amber. The story is told by adult Tolly as he recounts how he became a, you guessed it, teenage slasher. There's a sense of humility and self-awareness to Tolly that makes him engrossing to read. If you're a slasher fan, you're also in luck, because Jones writes some of the most creative slasher deaths to ever hit the printed page. There's plenty of violence, but Jones's characters examine the individual elements that make up a violent act so that it ultimately becomes an impressionist image in our minds, like Cameron in Ferris Bueller's Day Off staring at Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte too closely, for too long. I also recommend listening to this book as an audiobook, if you're not from Texas, because Michael Crouch reads it with a Texan accent and rhythm, which makes the story all the more transporting. 

Popverse Picks: My Heart Is A Chainsaw

We've got another slasher here with My Heart is a Chainsaw, the first book in the Indian Lake trilogy from Stephen Graham Jones. At the center of the story is a troubled teenage girl named Jade Daniels, who lives in a small town in Idaho called Proofrock, and spends her time watching slasher movies. As Jade would tell you herself, Proofrock is a pretty garbage place to be, but recently it's been infiltrated by a group of wealthy transplants who set up an exclusive community on Indian Lake called Nova Terra. Jade, who's Native on her father's side, isn't thrilled by this neo-colonialism going on. But it's once a violent series of murders sweeps Proofrock into a state of panic, Jade sees her chance to shine: she knows slashers, and she's sure as hell Proofrock has got a slasher on its hands. 

Jade Daniels feels like the younger sister I never had, and she has that effect on a lot of people. You care deeply for her even if she infuriates you with her endless references to old slasher movies you may or may not have seen. And you want to protect her from all harm just as much as you want to grab her by the shoulders, shake her a few times, and say, "What the hell are you doing?!" But when Jade gets a win, you're punching the air in celebration with a tear in your eye. The Indian Lake trilogy also includes the sequel books, Don't Fear the Reaper and The Angel of Indian Lake, and the entire story is a must-read. It'll break your heart, and then put it back together all over again. 

Popverse Picks: Mongrels

Remember when Kathryn Bigelow was cool and made vampire movies like Near Dark? What a time. Stephen Graham Jones achieves something similar here with Mongrels, except instead of a group of vampires on the move, it's a family of werewolves. This approach fits seamlessly with Jones's sensibilities as a writer, as he isn't interested in characters who live glamorous lives. If Twilight has been the only book you've read with werewolves, for the love of all things good, please read Mongrels. 

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." We couldn't agree more, which is why we've cobbled together a couple pieces to send a chill up your spine. Join Popverse as we explore:

• The best horror movies of all time, according to horror aficionado Greg Silber
• The most underrated horror movies from the past couple years
• All the new and upcoming horror movies for 2025 and beyond

And much gore. Er, more. Much more.