Mapping the Interior is a novella by Stephen Graham Jones, first published in 2016, when it won the Bram Stoker Award. This year, it has received a reissue by Tor Nightfire.
Jones is a Blackfeet Native American author of speculative fiction. In all of his books, he deliberately uses the word “Indian” to refer to Native Americans. This is clearly an example of reclaiming language, taking words historically used as slurs and reappropriating them with positive or neutral meanings as an act of resistance against discriminating and oppressive power structures and promoting empowerment. But to me as a white reader it does more than that: every time I come across the word “Indian,” I am implicitly reminded of the load of negative and violent history it bears, and that people much like me are to blame. It gives me a little guilty twinge that I cannot avoid, and I think that that’s a good thing. Among other stylistic elements, it does add to the visceral hauntings that Jones writes on the regular.
Jones also clearly has fun writing “slasher” novels like his popular Indian Lake trilogy, using a lot of horror film tropes and commenting on them via plot twists and meta-commentary from his protagonist. One of his major goosebump-inducing strengths lies in writing ghost stories, often with a twist or perspective that deviates from the classic (read: white, Victorian) haunting, and to some extent transcending genres, or blending them, combining elements of classic ghosts (ethereal, intangible, cursed or lost, something from the past returning to the present) with those of monsters we recognise from folklore or Weird fiction (very much tangible, spiky, hairy, scaly, or tentacled, older than time itself). His main characters are usually from his own tribe, and he is very much aware that the best way to deal with a colonial story (because that’s what it always comes down to—history cannot be shaken off or painted over) is to write it as a ghost story.
SFF is a good mode for writing about politics because metaphors can be written as real monsters (real demons, real hauntings). Classic ghost stories often prioritise atmosphere over plot; the fear response in the reader is usually elicited via the uncanny, a sense that we have shifted from our recognisable mundane reality into something we do not own. Sigmund Freud’s definition of the uncanny (in German: das Unheimliche, literally “the un-homely") uses the example of a key that unexpectedly doesn’t fit into the lock of our own front door. The place that we thought was our home, our safe space, isn’t ours anymore. We do not feel safe here. It’s the childhood moment at the mall when you turn around and the woman you had been talking to while your focus was on something else, maybe even tugging on her sleeve all the while, turns out to be not your mom.
It’s obvious why ghost stories work well as a mode for speaking about colonialism: the haunting represents the past that won’t stay buried; it’s the spectre of the cultural unconscious (the wasted potential of the oppressed and the guilty conscience of the oppressor—the literal skeletons in their metaphorical closet). What Stephen Graham Jones does differently is that he moves the haunting into a space-time that feels mythological and magical, interweaving times and lives. Outside time, outside human-made history, everything exists in the same space—where it overlaps and entangles.
In Ledfeather (2008), for example, this convoluted/simultaneous time works as curse and punishment for a white official who knowingly assisted in a genocide: The man is sort of quantum-entangled in a sin and crime that can never be undone, so he has to live and experience the guilt of being the perpetrator throughout time and feel in person the damage he and his cronies have caused for all generations of the tribe down the line. This concept of reality, which Jones also uses in Mapping the Interior, can sometimes leave the reader in a difficult spot and with a double perspective. We can choose to read what a character perceives as an illusion, a superstition, or madness. It might look like that to other characters in the same story. Or we can choose to suspend our disbelief, trust their perception and their subjective experience, and believe their story.
Not all readers in all places at all times are aware that all minorities have historical trauma (they used to kill our people; please don’t kill our people)—and that trauma, a real haunting, can be triggered by small, everyday things that aren’t noticed by those unaffected (so reactions can seem random and irrational). But subjective experience is real experience and has to be respected. As a white person, I cannot decide what is true for the Blackfeet tribe. If certain phenomena are connected to their traditions, their beliefs, their ancestors, and/or the historical trauma of their whole Nation, this is about Blackfeet culture, not about what the white reader thinks. So, rather than rationalising what’s happening in a supernatural story, I choose to go forward with an open mind and heart, ready to be scared, and to have my heart broken, because that’s what this book will do.
Mapping the Interior is a ghost story and a coming-of-age story. It starts with the protagonist’s sighting (or recollection of a sighting) of his father’s ghost. Long before we even learn the name of the protagonist (and first-person narrator), we learn that he is a sleepwalker. At this time, we don’t yet suspect that there could be more than one definition of sleepwalking, and that one of them will be of a supernatural nature. We do get informed, though, that this is very much about the conscious and unconscious mind, and of several levels of reality or self:
To sleepwalk is to be inhabited, yes, but not by something else, so much. What you’re inhabited by, what’s kicking one foot in front of the other, it’s yourself. [...] It’s telling you that there is a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out. (p.2)
This statement implies that we are not our true selves while awake, that we are too used to masking in public, so we push our true selves down, keep them imprisoned, subdued, controlled, hidden. Perhaps this is especially true for people who “don’t pass” and—because of who they are (non-white, poor, LGBTQIA+, a cultural and/or religious minority, etc.)—are haunted by a history of violence, the spectre of potential violence always a step behind them.
Junior, our protagonist, thinks that if he can find what his nighttime self is looking for or looking at, then there is a purpose to his sleepwalking. “Otherwise,” he says, “I was just broken, right?” (p.3). We learn that his father died when Junior was four years old. He has a baby brother, Dino, who is three years younger. Dino has some sort of learning disability (according to the descriptions, possibly caused by a developmental disorder) and is experiencing irregular seizures (possibly epilepsy). Because of this, he is also viciously bullied at school. Junior can’t protect him all the time, and not as well as he wishes he could. They live in a trailer with their mother, always referred to as “Mom.” She works full-time to make ends meet.
Junior first sees his father’s ghost at the age of eight. His father’s ghost is dressed like a Blackfeet traditional dancer (even though he was reportedly disconnected from tradition, never danced, never went to powwows)—but the way that his silhouette is described (only shapes and movement) makes it appear strange, deformed, uncanny. Junior tells us what he knows about his father’s death, that he “either drowned or was drowned—there’s stories both ways, and they each make sense” (p. 5). The narration moves to the dad’s childhood (via anecdotes, as told by the aunts, his sisters). We are moving backwards in time, and we are also moving deeper into tradition and oral storytelling.
The resulting stories use a lot of “woulds"—after all, “[t]hat’s how you talk about dead people […] especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments” (p. 6). This automatically brings to mind the communal trauma of the Native Americans, haunted by possibilities that never came to fruition—because they were taken away from them. According to Junior, when you are Blackfeet, other people (including your own) always see only what you could have been, as a person and as a people. Your potential, and your tribe’s potential, was never realised because all of those possibilities were taken from you. The constant haunting of all the tribes is this vision of potential. The potential (of the) people, the Nation, all the way back. Through the centuries, there is always that parallel plane that you can’t enter.
Junior, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to see the potential as squandered; there is a lot of power in his description of the fancy dancer face paint, which makes use of a sort of jumbled-up Western trope: “With your face black and white like that, you automatically slit your eyes like a gunfighter, like you’re staring America down across the centuries” (p. 6). The ghost with the fancy dancer outline seems to impersonate the father’s lost potential returned: “In death, he had become what he never could in life” (p. 7). This may be why the boy’s reaction to the apparition is not fear but hope. He keeps walking and re-walking the path he’d seen his dad’s ghost take, looking for the smallest shred of evidence that he’d been there, that the ghost was real. There’s a possibility that he heard a bead fall into a vent in the floor; there’s a chance that he saw a curtain fall shut in the empty house when he was out back. He becomes convinced that his father must have returned from the dead to see them, and that he must be hiding underneath the house.
To return to that double perspective which Jones places upon his reader, having a child narrator enables a switch between the narration’s point of view, however fantastical, and that of the rationalist adults in the story, whenever they appear. When she finds him up and about in the middle of the night with a skipping rope, Junior’s mother probably thinks that he’s up to no good (best-case scenario) or trying to hang himself (worst-case scenario)—when all he wants is to temporarily tie off the circulation in his legs to make his feet go to sleep, in order (of course) to be able to another world. This second definition of sleep walking is the means by which Junior is able to go see the ghost of his dad, and it makes sense to a child.
As readers of Junior’s narration, we too understand his magical thinking; but Junior’s mom—working full-time, raising two young boys by herself, worrying about the younger one’s health and development all the time—does not consider this possibility. Her attention is elsewhere, on the mundane day-to-day world, on trying to keep her little family alive and safe. In the meantime, Junior spends all of his free time working on side-stepping reality and finding his dad. We are still torn between these two perspectives when Junior looks under the house and starts talking to his dad: “He didn’t say anything back at first, but when he did, I wasn’t sure if it was in my ear or in my head. Either way, it was like he was using my own voice to do it” (p. 31).
Still catching the literary irony, the double perspective, do we choose to suspend our disbelief? Do we look for evidence ourselves (it’s tempting!), collecting all the uncanny bits and pieces and assessing whether there are outside witnesses? But we want to see what happens next, so we follow the narration, and Junior’s footsteps lead him and us right under the house, where he finds what he describes as more of a chrysalis than a nest. When the neighbour’s extremely aggressive dogs follow him there and start to dig under the trailer’s sheet metal skirt, it becomes very clear that at times the actual horror is very tangible and visceral. And also very mundane.
Jones’s description of this moment, filtered through the creative mind of his young protagonist, hits hard:
I was crying and snuffling and hugging myself, having to keep my head low so it wouldn’t collect all the webs spun under the floor of the living room—which, if this was the underside of the living room, then what did that make it, right?
I wouldn’t even say it out loud, even in my head. (p. 33)
Junior hits his head and blacks out. When he regains consciousness, his mother is there, the neighbour is there, and an ambulance is arriving for his head injury. What’s left of the dogs is strewn across the front yard—corpses found torn in two, their eyes covered with strips of black dish cloth—with the front door still locked and Junior passed out halfway out from under the house at the opposite end.
Which leaves the question: what is real?
After all, this is SFF—so do we trust the twelve-year-old protagonist that the ghost of his father is hiding under the house, gaining solidity by eating dead things? If he isn’t real, did Junior kill the neighbour’s dogs while concussed-sleepwalking? (But ... how?! The more likely option is that they would have torn the boy to shreds.) These questions are so impossible to answer that the whole situation becomes a family taboo. It’s just never brought up again.
Later in the story, something so big and shocking happens that I was almost fooled into believing it was the climax of the book. Junior is up in the middle of the night again. At this time his mother is dating the local deputy sheriff, who I assume is white, based on status and the fact that Junior says his name is Larsen. Junior sneaks out to the patrol car parked in front of the house while the deputy is inside with his mother. In a strange moment brought on by whim, curiosity, and opportunity (a bit of a classic “because I can” situation), he gets the deputy’s loaded pistol out of the glove compartment. Back inside the dark house, he interrupts a vampiric figure bent over his little brother in his bed, a figure he is convinced is his undead father nursing himself back to life by drinking from Dino’s life energy, causing his seizures. He shoots at the silhouette while it’s trying to escape out the back door, five times.
The timeline of Junior’s account of this event is a bit jumbled. He seems to remember screaming while pulling the trigger. In the end, all that’s there is the neighbour, shot dead right outside the back door, without a face, and with “a mass of bubbling red for a body” (p. 63). He was about to come in with his shotgun. The deputy comes out of his car and starts to hit Junior, savagely, repeatedly, out of control, until stopped by the boy’s mother using all of her strength to save her son (pp. 63-64). He drives off. In the morning there is no body; the little family is noticeably traumatised but nothing ever happens as a consequence.
If this was some sort of literary fiction coming-of-age story, we’d think that this was the main event. And since we’re not getting any easy answers from the narration, we are left to ponder: was the neighbour really there in the night, holding a shotgun? Did he get killed, or did the boy shoot at nothing, at empty air, at a nightmare he had while sleepwalking? Did the deputy hit Junior just for taking his gun and shooting it? Was that all the man saw? Still, we know what happened to the neighbour’s dogs, and Junior couldn’t have done it. So there is just one option left at this point: We are forced to believe that the revenant father is hiding under the house (in the uncanny and unspeakable underside of the living room), regaining strength by first eating whatever dead animals he found under there, then the dead dogs, then a whole dead person. How strong will this make him, and will he come back out to finish draining Dino of his life energy? Junior knows that he has to act in order to save his brother.
Because no, killing the neighbour (who may have been on the way into the house just as the father-creature was on its way out, and thus caught the bullets) was not the climax of the book. Confronting the haunting is. Junior creates a sleepwalking-magic scenario involving a superhero figurine to stand in for his father and fills the kitchen sink to drown him in. “He’d drowned once, my father. I was going to drown him again” (p. 77). But nothing ever goes as smoothly as planned, especially when you’re a preteen, does it? Junior (accidentally?) succeeds in stepping out of his nighttime kitchen and into the place and time of his father’s death. He learns how and why his father really died. It’s a petty revenge story involving poaching moose and a white lie, maybe a bit of bragging. It’s stupid and unnecessary, a waste of potential both for the victim and the killer, both still so young. But Junior is not only a witness. Sleepwalking, the boy steps into the body of the killer, inhabiting him, then actively kills his father across time. The moment the dad gets killed, that’s his son, killing his ghost in the future to save his brother.
The killer’s name is also Junior. Perhaps this is how the spirit journey works.
“Every fourth person on our reservation, that’s their name, like the same stupid person is trying life after life until he gets it right at last,” Junior tell us (p. 82). It sounds more like a curse than a blessing, and it definitely carries a tinge of the ever-recurring haunting itself.
Killing the father is almost Freudian, but in the most Native American way I’ve ever read. I’m also fascinated by how it’s written as quantum weird hauntology, a genre-transcending phenomenon described by China Miéville in his essay “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire” (2008). Based on implicit genre “rules,” we expect ghosts to stick to certain conventions, like being a projection of a past occurrence or a spectre of a dead person, being transparent and intangible and incapable of interfering with or harming live human beings. The monsters of Weird fiction, on the other hand, are usually something that has always been there, preceding humanity, and are very much corporeal and able to harm and kill humans. When a ghost oversteps our genre-based expectations and starts to become something we hadn’t imagined and starts to try and kill people (like in M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904), or like in Stephen Graham Jones’s Mapping the Interior), things get interesting. Nothing is ever as fear-inducing as a creature that doesn’t abide by the tropes.
But then again. If you thought that a boy killing his own father across time—yet again and yet simultaneously for the first time—in order to save his baby brother’s potential from being wasted was the heartbreaking moment of the book, I’m sorry. The plastic superhero taking the place of the father and transforming into the real father, the authority figure, the powers in place when space-time starts shifting; the brother’s potential always already contained all of the Native tribes’ potential): There’s more to come. One more kick to the guts.
At the very end, when the past-tense narrative finally catches up with Junior’s present (almost as if the oral storytelling technique had been a trap, a ruse to distract us from what was happening while explaining to us why it’s happening, in classic villain-monologue mode), we are confronted with history repeating, as usual and in twisted ways. Junior’s current plan, that he’s been preparing to complete while telling us this story from his past, is to kill the brother he saved in order to bring his own dead son back from the dead. It’s a self-perpetuating haunting, a fable about gambling current potential, current life-force, against what has been lost in the past.
“This is something all Indians think, I think: that, yeah, we got colonized, yeah, we got all our lands stolen, yeah yeah yeah, all that usual stuff. But still, inside us, hiding—no, hibernating, waiting, curled up, is some Crazy Horse kind of fighter. Some killer who’s smart and wily and wears a secret medicine shirt that actually works” (pp. 17-18). This passage is the key to all of the book. This, and the notion of finding a way to step out of our world and enter that parallel, unreachable plane where all of this is true and manifest.
As usual, Stephen Graham Jones succeeds in communicating the realities of growing up in a family trying to make it outside the Blackfeet reservation while also convincing even the reluctant reader, bit by bit, to follow the protagonist into a very different reality that is the only way he can make sense of what’s happening to his family. Once you surrender completely, you will be made to feel the pain of not just having lost something dear and meaningful but also of continuing to sacrifice the past for the present—your past for the potential future—and always, always losing out. This ghost story may well be the most visceral way to teach others what it means continuously to try to get your community’s potential back, and in the process always to find out that it isn’t you who is calling the shots. There is always some higher power, one which has been there before you even started figuring things out. If that doesn’t pin down colonialism, what does? I hope that it makes you as angry as it does me.