Instead of pulling the door shut, too, the kid, that Doby Saxon whose mum had married that Yellowtail who didn’t even have an Indian name anymore, he just stood there like he was waiting for permission to come in, waiting for me or Junior to say to him it was ok if he had the snow crusted all over him still, that he could stomp it off in here if he wanted, that we’d mop it up later.

But then I looked to what he was looking at.

It was the back door; all the way through the dining room.

Because the front door was open, the back door was rattling, like somebody was trying to get in, or had just left. I’m not even sure the kid  knew we could see him.

Stephen Graham Jones writes with a very personal style. And I liked it a lot. I also liked a lot his storyteller’s trick in this story (I won’t reveal it). I thought it was very clever, and created a very involving, dreamy atmosphere for this peculiar story.

But in the end, this trick was a lot less meaningful to the story than I thought it would be, and in fact turned out to be quite inconsequential, which was a let down for me. The story turned out to be confusing too, which also is a pity. There are a lot of very clever intuitions in this story, but I’m not at all sure they were exploited to their full strength.

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