FARGO — Five years after the massacre on the Blackfeet reservation, Nathan Yellow Tail wakes up in a hospital room. He should be dead. His best friend, Sebby, lies a few doors down, barely holding on. So when Nate is offered a chance to reset his life — and maybe save Sebby in the process — he takes it. He climbs into a run-down camper van filled with three older Blackfeet and sets out to find the bones of a Blackfeet boy who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and to bring him home.
That is the premise of "Off the Reservation," the new novel from Stephen Graham Jones, and the reason the author will be at Barnes & Noble in Fargo on Thursday, Oct. 15, at 7 p.m. to discuss and sign copies. The event is free and open to the public.
It is a homecoming of sorts — not for Jones, who grew up in West Texas and lives in Boulder, Colorado, but for the story. "Off the Reservation" is a sequel to "The Only Good Indians," his 2020 breakout horror novel about four Blackfeet men hunted by the vengeful spirit of an elk they killed a decade earlier. That book, published by Saga Press and Titan Books, made Jones a New York Times bestselling author and became one of the most celebrated horror novels of its year. It was written, Jones has said, during a stay at a rented house in Colorado.
The new book picks up with Nate, one of the survivors of the revenge killings in the first novel. This time the horror is unearthed rather than summoned: the activists' quest to repatriate the boy's remains releases something terrible along with the bones. As the publisher's description puts it, "the past is more than bones, and the worst things you can bury can also be the worst to unearth."
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the real institution at the center of the novel, was the flagship of the United States' Indian boarding school system, operating in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from 1879 to 1918. It was founded on the explicit premise of forced assimilation — the school's own founder, Richard Henry Pratt, coined the phrase "kill the Indian, save the man." Thousands of Indigenous children from more than 100 tribes were enrolled there over four decades, separated from their families and stripped of their languages and cultures. Jones's novel draws directly on that history, and on the ongoing work of repatriating the remains of children who died at the school.
Jones, born in Midland, Texas, on Jan. 22, 1972, is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana. He has published more than 30 novels, novellas and story collections, and his work is known for fusing Indigenous characters and settings with horror — a combination that has earned him a rare kind of crossover acclaim. His 2024 novel "The Buffalo Hunter Hunter," a historical horror story set in 1912, drew praise from the Los Angeles Times and Time, and was recommended by former President Barack Obama. His Indian Lake Trilogy, which began with "My Heart Is a Chainsaw" in 2021, is regarded as a defining statement on the slasher genre.
By day, Jones is the Ineva Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has taught since 2008. In his author bio, he notes that he "really likes werewolves and slashers," and that his favorite novels change daily — though Valis, Love Medicine, Lonesome Dove, It and The Things They Carried are "usually up there somewhere."
"Off the Reservation" was released on Oct. 13, 2026, from Titan Books, two days before the Fargo event. The Barnes & Noble store is located at 1201 42nd St. SW in Fargo.
For readers who have followed Jones's Blackfeet saga from the beginning, the Fargo stop is a chance to hear the author talk about where the story goes next — and about the real history that haunts it. For everyone else, it is a free evening with one of the most distinctive voices in American horror, in a bookstore, no ticket required.