Alena Bruzas grew up in Seattle and currently lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her family. She is the author of the acclaimed novel Ever Since, and she hopes her writing will find the people who need it most. When she's not writing, Bruzas serves on the board for Ten Thousand Villages, Lincoln. She also occasionally cooks dinner, worries about commas, and wanders the prairie.
Bruzas's new novel is To the Bone.
At CrimeReads the author tagged seven favorite literary horror novels, including:
Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good IndiansRead about another title on the list.
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones deserves top billing on this list. As a reader it enthralled me. As a writer it gave me the kind of despair an artist feels when they behold a true master and know they will never measure up.Jones is well known enough that he needs no introduction, so let me just tell you why I love this book. First, the writing; so good, weird yet gorgeous, realistic but reflective and deep. The book follows four friends, men of the Blackfeet nation, who ten years prior killed an elk, unaware that it was pregnant. Lewis is my favorite narrator, although it switches point of view often and with intention. Lewis’s descent into madness is *chef’s kiss* as he is consumed by guilt and grief for the mother elk and her fetus, and is convinced a woman with the head of an elk is hunting him. The story grapples with what it is to be an indigenous person in America today, and the contradictions inherent to individual identity and tradition. Jones also gives space to the point of view of the elk woman who actually is hunting the four friends and manages, despite the violence and visceral anger of her perspective, to have me rooting for her until it comes to a showdown between the elk woman and Denorah, the teenage daughter of one of the four, and an exceptional final girl.
The Only Good Indians is among Samsun Knight's seven top horror novels about mysticism, B.R. Myers's ten quietly effective suspense novels, and Gus Moreno's top ten groundbreaking horror novels.
--Marshal Zeringue
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