[8] Jones's enthusiasm for reading began at the early age of 11; however, as a boy he had aspirations to be a farmer, never a teacher or a writer.

After completing a semester of college, Jones decided to continue to pursue his degree while still having the intention to return to a manual labor job post-grad.

[11] While he was attending Florida State University, Jones's dissertation director introduced him to Houghton-Mifflin editor Jane Silver at the Writers' Harvest conference.

[13] In 2006, he won the Jesse Jones Award for Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters for his 2005 short story collection Bleed into Me.

[20] Scholar Cathy Covell Waegner describes Jones's work as containing elements of "dark playfulness, narrative inventiveness, and genre mixture.

"[21] Joseph Gaudet cited Jones' writing as "post-ironic" or representative of David Foster Wallace's "New Sincerity", a literary approach "emerging in response to the cynicism, detachment, and alienation that many saw as defining the postmodern canon," seeking instead "to more patently embrace morality, sincerity, and an 'ethos of belief'.

Jones’ novels can be described as Native American Gothic, or Rez Gothic: a niche publishing genre characterized as using fantasy, science fiction and horror to shed light on racial inequalities such as the one referenced through Jones’ novel title The Only Good Indians.