Bleeding All over the Shelves and Tracking It Out into the World: Theorizing Horror in the Indigenous North American Novels The Only Good Indians and Empire of Wild

Abstract

Abstract: In this article, I theorize horror in the Indigenous North American novels The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones and Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline. There have been multiple article-length explorations of the emergence of a possible Indigenous gothic due to the gothic's scholarly reception as "highbrow," but the recent proliferation of so-called "lowbrow" horror literature written by Indigenous North American authors has seen little scholarly attention. Examining the history of the gothic in horror in North America and its relation to White North American subjectivity and regenerative violence, I begin to theorize why and how Indigenous authors are engaging with horror to posit multiple Indigenous North American subjectivities. I argue that both novels examined here reject White North American subjectivity and regenerative violence through metatextuality, closed cycles of justice, and generative violence while differing in important ways that are grounded in the concept of transmotion.