Indian Killer: A Novel

Amazing book, really engaging and full of suspense! Very violent and thrilling! Gives a different portrayal of Indians and leaves us questioning about the identity of the Indian Killer! Loved studying it, Alexie is a brilliant writer!

I'm a fan of Sherman Alexie, and this is set in modern Seattle. What really disturbed me is the amount of hatred he paints between the Indians and other Americans living in the city.. Is this true or magnified to make the story work?

Sherman Alexie is a fantastically gifted writer, and Reservation Blues and his short stories are recognized as masterpieces. This book, however, is so different in its focus and execution that one wonders what Alexie's motivation was in publishing it. The main character is despicable--and obviously mentally ill. He brutalizes the most innocent of victims, shocking the reader with murders which could not be more loathsome in their graphic detail. This violence is gratuitous. We are given no understanding of the man or his motivation.Some might argue that because he was stolen from his Indian mother and given to whites to raise that he never felt part of either the white or Indian worlds, and that this is his justification, if not his motivation. But he was an infant when this kidnapping happened, however disgraceful it was, and his adoptive parents were loving ones. It's the old Nature vs. Nurture theme, and Alexie seems to be saying here that Nurture counts for less than nothing if it takes place in a white environment.Perhaps Alexie is trying to turn the tables by having an Indian exact the kind of gratuitous violence against the white world that has been exacted against Native Americans. If that is the case, he has confused the issue by having his killer be part of neither culture, with no social values from either culture infusing his actions. And if Alexie's point is that other Indians are justified in feeling like his killer, one wonders why his depiction of Indian life in Reservation Blues, for example, is so bleak and why his main characters there escape to the white world, "[singing] together...with the shadow horses....a song of mourning that would become a song of celebration." Mary Whipple