"Sheriff Skip Harding is investigating a double murder that has shaken the quiet town of Logan, Missouri. A slaughter that seems too brutal for a human perpetrator. A bear, maybe? But there are no bears in the area…Bodies begin to pile up, and Skip soon discovers that bullets are useless against this foe. Only with the help of Cherokee game warden Jay Little Hawk, and the wisdom of Lakota medicine man George Strong Eagle, can Skip hope to stop the monster before it’s too late."
This book was originally published in 1996 but I first heard about it a few years ago on a book recommendation list of creature horror by Native American authors when The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones was making the rounds on bookish social media. I was instantly intrigued by the synopsis and it 1000% does not disappoint. This is a fantastic creature slasher with a ton of kills, fast pacing, and world building. It does not read like an almost 30 year old story and will be one I recommend over and over again going forward.
The horror aspects of this story are fantastic. I think calling it a creature-slasher is the most accurate because we have a lot of on-page kills from the creature and the small town local police force are trying to catch up as the bodies keep dropping. There is a good amount of gore - of both the people and animal variety - and Goingback does such a good job of giving us fantastic descriptions without this feeling overly gruesome. We also get some great suspense and stalking moments with the creature that had me holding my breath. We get some supernatural/otherworldly elements in regards to the Crota legend as well as the Native American characters working to find a way to defeat the creature. These elements weren't horrific, in the typical horror book sense, but they were unsettling and atmospheric and really helped build the overall tension and vibe of the read.
The characters were typical slasher characters where we know just enough about them to make them feel real, but never really have a whole lot of time to see much character development. This is also a multi-POV read so we are jumping between multiple characters. This is a small town so everyone knows everyone which again limits the sort of more natural character exposition that we might get in other reads. Given all of that, I still had a really good sense for the three main characters we end up following and they all had very distinct voices from each other so I didn't get confused over which character we were following.
The pacing for this was fast, but in the best way. The whole story takes place over about a week or so and it is really non-stop. We get multiple deaths, revelations, and action scenes during the 320 pages. Goingback manages to put in a few quieter moments in the book to give the reader a little bit of a rest, but other than that it is pretty much go-time. The pacing really made this a great page-turner read and once I got to the halfway point, I didn't want to put it down until I was finished. The pacing along with the multiple POV switches helped to build the tension by not letting the reader really relax or forget about the constant threat of the Crota and when it will strike next.
Overall, this was a fantastic creature-slasher horror with great pacing and tension. Highly recommend!
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