Stephen Graham Jones Says a Good Spine-Tingler Hinges on Its Ending

Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Nation from Midland, Texas, said he never intended to be a writer. “I only planned to drive a tractor and be a farmer,” he said. He recalled reading novels since third or fourth grade and reaching their endings with the thought that he could end a story that way too.

Jones said craft can get a writer through about 95% of a novel. “The craft is mechanics. It’s the little techniques you use to achieve this or that, and situate the story and the reader. That’s all crafting technique,” he said. The art of writing a good story, he added, comes into focus at the wrap-up. He described a story as running along the top of a flat mesa at night, with 95% of it even-footing, before the writer jumps off into the darkness and trusts there will be another toe hold.

NPR’s Weekend Edition has been exploring why people are drawn to scary stories and how horror has become big business. Experts studying fear have theorized that one major reason people are flocking to horror experiences is that the world feels uncertain. Jones said he agrees, and that “whether that ending is up or down, that ending is what we’re here for.” He said a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, whether it is a train or daylight, means the tunnel people are in in the world is also probably going to have an end.

Jones said the genre also gives writers and readers an opportunity to explore the past. “In our current moment, there’s a lot of effort to … cleanse the past of any wrongdoing,” he said. “And so I think we need continual reminders that our footsteps to get here are all bloody,” including violence against native people and Indian boarding schools.

Jones has been publishing novels, short stories and novellas for decades. His breakout work was “The Only Good Indians,” and his latest is a sequel to that 2020 hit, titled “Off the Reservation.” Both novels follow characters attempting to square their heritage and histories with hauntings and possessions. Jones said he was initially reluctant to use such titles because he did not want to “cede that damaging phrase back into the world,” but an editor said it would help the stories go “wide,” and a friend convinced him the title was appropriate based on the characters’ struggles with identity. He said he reread the novel and found every character “wrangling with, ‘am I a good Indian in the contemporary world or not?’” He concluded that the novel did earn that title.

Jones said writing monsters, ghouls or slashers, his particular favorite, is about creating characters unique enough to be interesting but with enough blank space for readers to graft their own demons onto them. “Then the story matters to them in a completely different way,” he said. “Once you get the reader picturing it in their minds without you quite having to say it, that’s when the scare can really be effective.” He said a writer builds the monster from a bad coach, a parent one is having difficulties with, a bully at school or a teacher who does not like the reader. “You build them from who you’re afraid of yourself,” he said.

Jones said that to write a good story, a writer has to have something to say. That does not mean preaching, he said; just write truthfully and the rest will fall into place, whether the writer is writing for 15 people or 15 million.

Editor’s Summary: Stephen Graham Jones told NPR that horror fiction succeeds or fails at its ending, with craft supporting but not replacing that final leap. He linked horror to present uncertainty and historical reckoning, and said monsters work best when readers can project their own fears onto them. His new novel, “Off the Reservation,” continues the characters and themes of “The Only Good Indians.”