This novel doesn’t waste time explaining things to an outsider. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. And that’s part of its magic. The world Jones builds is immersive and insular; white people exist in the periphery, almost like background noise, and that in itself is a powerful narrative choice. Indigenous horror doesn’t have to justify itself to a colonial gaze. This isn’t a story about suffering for the sake of sympathy—it’s a story about an indigenous community, by an indigenous writer, told in a way that doesn’t dilute itself for mass consumption.

Similar to the unsettling discomfort of yanking out one strand of hair or accidentally lifting a nail bed briefly against the edge of a table, Bazterrica’s flavor of horror is breakneck, deliciously nauseating, and will not be easily forgotten in the annals of any reader’s sensational memory.