Kill Hole - Hardcover

Novelist, poet, and essayist Highwater (Myth and Sexuality, 1989, etc.) offers a dark, elegiac modern myth about a young Native American who, as a little boy, is torn from his roots and his true identity; this doomed and lonely protagonist later loses his cultured urban life and his identity as an artist because he falls into the murderous hands of a mysterious and ignorant people. ``My name is Sitko Ghost Horse.'' Numb and terrified, the young painter stands repeating his name before a tribunal of strange, primitive people. They accuse Sitko of breaking taboo by stumbling into their village during a sacred ceremony involving their children. Sitko must be a demon, they decide. While waiting for either a death sentence or his liberation, Sitko sits in a tiny prison cell, telling his life story to a big, warmhearted hermaphrodite named Patu. Patu is sacred in the tribe, a ``powerful woman'' who knows the secret of making pottery that breathes with life. Sitko tells Patu how he ran blind from a terrible ``sickness'' sweeping through the cities, stumbling into this village when he could run no more. His beautiful male lover, Eric, had wasted away from the sickness, and terrified people came and burned his loft and all his canvases. Long before reclaiming the name Sitko Ghost Horse, he was called ``Seymour Miller''--the adopted son of a man who hated him. Scarred by his memory of his true parents' abandonment--and by witnessing a brutal act of despair and revenge--Sitko Ghost Horse convinces Patu that he's fully human and not a demon. But will the pain he's endured or the beauty he's created persuade the stupid, evil old men who judge him? An original and arresting AIDS allegory, shot through with Native American insight and depth of feeling, but heavy with portentous images and self-seriousness. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Highwater's first novel in six years is an awkwardly written, disappointing continuation of his popular Ghost Horse cycle. Set in the immediate future, the overly complicated story concerns Sitko Ghost Horse, grandson of Amana (the protagonist of Legend Days and The Ceremony of Innocence ). Raised by whites and called Seymour Miller, Ghost Horse becomes a successful artist and awakens to his Native American heritage. His career is nearly wrecked, however, when rumors circulate that he isn't really Indian at all. An unnamed plague (remarkably like AIDS) then strikes the city, killing both enemies and friends, including his gay lover. Ghost Horse flees the decaying city only to stumble upon a mysterious tribal civilization that is about to perform one of its most sacred rituals; unless he can prove he is a bona fide Indian, he will be put to death as an interloper. He manages to escape into the surrounding desert, still pursued by the Indian leader, Delito. Given the widely circulated assertions that Highwater is not of Indian blood--as reported in the national Native American newspaper Akwesasne Notes and such books as Ward Churchill's recent Fantasies of the Master Race (Nonfiction Forecasts, Jan. 20)--this latest work comes off as thinly veiled self-justification with strong overtones of persecution and revenge fantasy.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.