Published six years after I Wear the Morning Star (1986), which was the third novel in the "Ghost Horse Cycle," Kill Hole follows the life of Sitko Ghost Horse after the death of everyone in his family. While the other books in the Cycle detail the history of a family in a chronological progression, this novel begins in the future but returns to incidents from the past, as Sitko searches for the reasons for his survival. Gone are some, but not all, of the Native American myths and legends. In their place are references to twentiethcentury writers and the personal mythology of the Ghost Horse family.

The novel seems, in part, to be related to the growth of interest in myths during the 1980s and 1990s which was spurred by a new edition of Joseph Campbell's 1949 classic Hero with a Thousand Faces, Rollo May's The Cry for...