Six years ago, Stephen Graham Jones published The Only Good Indians, one of the most acclaimed and beloved horror novels of the 2020s. The story of a group of Blackfeet men and the crime against nature that has left them cursed to be stalked by a monster, the book broke Jones through to a new level in the world of genre fiction, won numerous awards, and helped pave the way for a new wave of Indigenous horror authors with vital, essential stories to tell.
Now, more than half a decade later, Jones is returning to that world.
This month, Saga Press will release Off The Reservation, a sequel and companion novel to The Only Good Indians, which came as a complete surprise to many of Jones’ readers when it was announced. Today, with just a week to go until the book’s release, Bloody Disgusting is pleased to reveal an exclusive excerpt of what’s in store.
Set five years after The Only Good Indians, Off The Reservation picks up the story of one of the few survivors of that novel, Nathan Yellow Tail. Nate made it through that massacre, only to be nearly killed all over again by a car crash that left his best friend, Sebby, worse off than he is. Discharged from the hospital and terrified that Sebby’s on the brink of death, Nate gets an unusual offer from a small band of Blackfeet activists. Will he go with them, packed into a raggedy RV dubbed the Sundancer, halfway across the country to retrieve and repatriate the remains of another Blackfeet who died at an industrial school in Pennsylvania?
For Nate, it’s a chance at atonement, giving him a shot at restoring a certain degree of balance and, on some cosmic level, saving Sebby’s life. What he doesn’t know, of course, is that other forces in the world are stacked against him, making this much more than a mournful road trip.
In the excerpt below, you’ll get to read the moment that Nate gets this offer and meet Seine, the activist who talks Nate into the Sundancer in the first place.
Off The Reservation
Seine had saged the hell out the Sundancer, too, humming the necessary song in her chest.
Maybe they were invisible? Invisible enough?
Being on a holy mission, that had to help.
And having the kid with them couldn’t hurt.
She buzzed deeper into his ruined hair, and the motion she caught up front wasn’t Christian and Mooch, back yet, but herself in Christian’s rearview mirror. Which she guessed he’d installed because . . . because Mooch was going to be behind him, yes?
Good idea, Seine figured.
He must know about that ice pick she carried in her waistband, and what it could do. What it had done.
But don’t let that in, Seine told herself, buzzing the kid’s hair down into the sheet, row after row after row. Only let the good in, not the bad. Pure hearts win the day.
She razed another line. The kid’s scalp was pale, but so was the rest of him, he’d been inside so long. He was the ghost of an Indian, pretty much, which was funny, since, considering the tangle of metal he’d been pulled from, he should have been an actual ghost.
Except for that Yellow Tail blood.
Which she was counting on to charm this long shot of a mission.
“This is like a reset for you,” she told him, his hair collecting on the sheet. “You’re starting over, now. People always say Indians do this so everyone can know they’re grieving, but it’s really because, without whoever you lost, you’re no longer yourself. So, you might as well start living like that.”
That sounded good, didn’t it? Good enough?
“Elves,” Nate said after Seine had spidered the fingers of her left hand over his head to rotate his face around to the side she was on.
“What?” she said, looking down, then—oh yeah: these scrubs. Light blue with little elves all over, riding wrapped Christmas presents, their elf eyes big and excited, each of them now sporting a hand-drawn single feather coming up from the back of their heads, making them Indian. It was what Seine did with all her work clothes: the teddy bears would have that thick arrow starting at the mouth and curving down to their heart; the cute alligators would all have buffalo horns; the cowboy toy from that kids’ movie had a spear through his chest each time he showed up at a different angle. Changing Nate’s bandages and working his various drips, Seine had told him she did her scrubs up like this so the patient would have something to get lost in, to distract them, but really this was what her resistance and hostility had come down to: graffiti. On something she owned.
“You live here?” Nate asked then, about the Sundancer.
“Just for this week,” Seine said back, tilting his head forward to get at the back. The kid wiggled, said it tickled, but she held him still.
While his eyes were down like that she said, “You do too, now, if you want.”
That got him sitting back up, his eyes finding hers.
“You’re out as of today, I mean,” she told him, tapping the silver watch on her wrist. “Released, finished, done.”
“Healed,” he added, kind of waiting for her to confirm this.
“Well,” Seine said, shrugging a bit, making a show of studying his new stubble for uneven parts, and coming at them with the hungry-hungry clippers.
“I don’t—”
Seine slapped her hand down onto the tabletop, bringing him back to her.
“I’m not just gonna kidnap you here,” she said as softly as she could manage, sitting down opposite him so they could be at the same level. “You know the score here. What this is for”—the Sundancer—“it’s the Heavy Runner kid. You’re the fourth. This gets the world back in order, in balance. It makes things right.”
Fourth, she still liked that.
Why not?
“‘It makes things right . . .’” the kid repeated, sort of to himself, like making all this make sense. He chewed his lower lip in, was staring through the windshield at—
They were already back from the IGA.
Mooch Lomas stepped up, in, and then to the side, sweeping her famously long hair out of the way to make room for Christian Two Bulls in that priest getup he wore like a costume, one hand carrying the bible he’d never let go of, the other a paper sack with beef jerky mounded up in it, his little round sunglasses pulled tight to his eyes, sort of hiding them, sort of exaggerating them, giving him an androgynous look in spite of his goatee, his height. He ran one big hand along the stubble on his scalp, nodded to Nate about them being the same, here.
Seine gathered the sheet, spilled no hair, balled it up. Nurses know sheets, and messes.
“Remember the marshmallows?” she said, looking over to Mooch and Christian.
Mooch, sucking on an Icee’s tall red straw, reached into the sack Christian was holding and waggled the generic marshmallows up from the jerky, wowing her big eyes about it.
Seine nodded, satisfied with the snack run anyway, if not with Mooch herself.
“Well?” she said across the table to Nate.
The kid was looking from Mooch to Christian to the RV. And, finally, back to Seine.
“Where even is this . . . this boarding school?” he asked, which meant she had him. He was in.
“Carlisle, Pennsylvania,” Seine intoned, all the blood rushing to her face.
She watched the kid visibly swallow, and resist asking where Pennsylvania was. Like most born in Browning, he’d probably never been out of Montana at all. The reservation was safe. Everywhere else was scary, unknown—America will eat you, disappear you, process you through so you come out with no memory of who you used to be. She could read it on his face obvious as anything.
“Two days there, two back,” she filled in for him, and rapped twice on the tabletop with her knuckle, could feel Mooch and Christian watching, waiting, Christian of course not saying any-thing, Mooch still sucking obscenely on that big-bore straw.
“You can’t know bringing this kid back’ll bring Sebby back too,” Nate finally said, hardly loud enough to make it past his lips.
“But it might,” Seine said back, just as quiet.
Excerpted from OFF THE RESERVATION by Stephen Graham Jones. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of Saga Press at Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Off The Reservation is available October 13 wherever you get your books.
