REVIEW 07
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Buffalo Hunter Hunter
[2025] [fantasy/horror]
This chilling historical novel is set in the nascent days of the state of Montana, following a Blackfeet Indian named Good Stab as he haunts the fields of the Blackfeet Nation looking for justice. It begins when a diary written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall in 2012. What is unveiled is a slow massacre, a nearly forgotten chain of events that goes back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow, told in the transcribed interviews with Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar and unnaturally long life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story, captured in the vivid voices of the time, by one of the new masters of literary horror, Stephen Graham Jones.
“it wasn’t us, it would have been another regiment,” I said, calmer again. “You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.” “But we were already a nation,” he said up to me. “We didn’t ask you to come.”
I picked up this book without knowing anything of the plot, and honestly I think that it's the best way to read it. Now please bear with me, I have a ton of thoughts about this book, it coincidentally dived into a lot of topics that I was working on my essays, so I'm really excited to talk about it!.
First of all as a reader from a third world country, I am used to colonial violence being treated as background, something that happened "back then" so the plot can move on. Jones does the opposite. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is about the Marias Massacre of 1870, when the U.S. Cavalry killed nearly 200 Blackfeet, mostly women, children and elders, in the snow. The book does not let that violence stay in the past, and it matters to me that a Blackfeet writer is the one telling it.
The structure is a nesting doll. In 2012, a junior professor named Etsy Beaucarne inherits a journal found behind a wall. It was written in 1912 by her ancestor Arthur, a Lutheran pastor, and it records the confession of Good Stab, a Blackfeet man who says he is a vampire (!!!!). He is much older than he looks, and he is hunting the buffalo hunters who destroyed his people's way of life. Arthur hides behind "fancy words" like a shield, while Good Stab is direct and refuses to soften his language for anyone. He calls himself "the worst dream America ever had," which says a lot.
The vampire rules are where Jones gets clever. These vampires are pure appetite, and they take on the physical traits of whatever they feed on. If Good Stab wants to keep anything of the Blackfeet warrior he was, he eventually has to consider feeding on his own people. That is the settler colonial demand in one image: disappear, or become something unrecognisable.
The main argument of the book is that the horror is not a metaphor. Genocide denial works through euphemism, statistics and a demand for clean, complete, chronological records. Jones answers with a fragmented, contradictory journal and with bodies. The murders that open Arthur's account involve men skinned like buffalo, this works as symbolism but most importantly they are the original violence repeating itself. A statistic can be disputed, but a body is harder to argue with. Jones has said his vampires are "wish fulfillment" rather than allegory, so Good Stab does not stand in for resistance. He carries it out, bloodily and impossibly.
Something that I didn't like (I mean I like it but not that much) the book it's a slow burn for something with this much carnage, and the three-voice structure can feel distant. Etsy's sections, with her tenure anxiety and her digitising of crumbling pages, feel like a frame the book has to maintain rather than a voice that earns its place, like sometime I genuinely forgot about her. The framing also bothers me a little. A white academic finds a white pastor's journal, and the reader has to pass through Arthur to reach Good Stab. Jones is too skilled to make Arthur the centre, but the ending, which returns to Etsy, risks turning the horror into a tidy academic mystery.
Still, it does what the best horror does: it refuses closure. There is no catharsis and no debt settled, only the insistence that the past is not past and the dead are not gone. It is not Anne Rice with a Native coat of paint. It is angrier, harder and more formally daring, a counter-archive that carries memory through sensation where the history book and the courtroom fall short.
