Indian Burial Ground by Nick Medina

 

This is a powerfully grim novel about depression on a Native American reservation, and how the people there struggle with it, struggle to keep from being dragged into its belly, torn apart by it, killed by it. It's also a novel about how the people who survive depression, the people who avoid its fangs, the people personally untouched by it who watch their friends and family members and lovers disappear into its maw, how those people struggle with the aftermath of its meals, how they carry on, how they struggle to escape not just the depression but the reservation, how they get pulled back in clawing at the earth leaving bloody nail tracks. It's not a particularly graceful novel, the two timelines are kinda muddled and just about all characters who are neither elderly nor toddlers seem perpetually teenaged--I almost put the book down several times--but it's got the author's blood and pain all over its pages. Oh, and there's some spirit that's maybe going around making people kill people until it's put back underground by someone doing a traditional dance;  it's hard to say.