‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’: Read An Exclusive Excerpt From Stephen Graham Jones’ New Novel

Matthew Jackson |

Mar 18, 2025

Since his breakthrough novel Mongrels established him with a wider audience as one of the most exciting and influential voices in modern horror, Stephen Graham Jones has been on one of the greatest rolls in genre fiction. He’s done Indigenous folk horror with The Only Good Indians, slashers with My Heart is a Chainsaw and I Was a Teenage Slasher, and much more through countless short stories and several novellas. Now, it’s time for Jones’ take on the vampire novel.

Set across three distinct eras of a American history, with an epic scope that makes it a great historical novel as well as a great horror story, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter tells the story of Good Stab, a Blackfeet hunter who’s cursed with vampirism after a violent encounter with a strange creature around the same time that 200 of his people were slaughtered in the Marias Massacre in 1870 Montana.

Good Stab’s story filters down to us through Etsy Beaucarne, an academic in 2012 who unearths a journal written by one of her ancestors, the minister Arthur Beaucarne, who encountered Good Stab in 1912. Despite his doubts, he wrote down the Blackfeet’s strange story of an insatiable thirst for blood, and a quest for brutal revenge for the massacre that’s left a trail of bodies through the Mountain West. Told in three different voices and driven by Jones’ knack for chilling, heartbreaking narrative, it’s one of the must-read horror books of 2025, and we’ve got an early peek right here.

To celebrate the release of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Dread Central is pleased to present an excerpt from one of the novel’s most exciting early moments, in which Good Stab first describes his encounter with a creature he calls the “Cat Man.” It’s the beginning of Jones’ vampire narrative, and gives a lot of insight into the kinds of monsters you can expect to find in this book.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is now available from Saga Press.

The first thing I saw was the dirty blue back of a soldier.

I spit the arrow I was carrying in my mouth into my hand and drove it into this soldier’s blue back then dove past, already pulling the next arrow back in my bow, to let go into the face of the soldier who had been beside the first one, was just looking over to what was

Happening.

He stood up with the arrow in his eye, his hands on that arrow, and I left him dying there, ran into the open part past the trees, which was the way Peasy had said would be the best way up.

Tall Dog’s big horse, maybe because it had originally been a napikwan horse, had pulled the wagon over to be a wall for us to hide behind. Except there were greased-shooters everywhere, coming in from all directions. It was the soldiers we had been following. They’d

seen the storm coming like we had, and were backtracking to get down to where the snow wouldn’t trap them up here.

I wished we had a medal from their war chiefs we could hold up, to tell these soldiers we weren’t Owl Child, I wished we had a piece of paper like Heavy Runner did, saying we were good Pikuni. But all we had were each other, and one round-ball gun that was good for one

shot, then would have to be reloaded, and maybe not even shoot then.

I slid behind the wagon Tall Dog had his back against, his long fingers trying to hold in the blood coming from his chest.

It was dark and thin, was from the liver, and there was too much of it to hold.

He shook his head no to the question in my eyes, and I rolled away just as a greased-shooter popped through the wagon where I’d been sitting, throwing splinters into my back and the side of my face.

When I stumbled a few paces out, it was because I’d tripped over Hunts-to-the-Side’s body facedown in the snow, covered in all of his blood, his round-ball gun still in his hand, its powder spilled on the snow in front where its barrel had coughed it out. Meaning Hunts-to-the-

Side hadn’t even gotten his one shot off.

I rolled past him, knew this wasn’t a fight anymore, that all I could do was run for Chief Mountain, ask him to take me, to hold me close, to save me, his Pikuni child.

Which was when a greased-shooter hit me in the left shoulder, high, right here, and spun me around, my bow slinging away, my war club still tied to my saddle, wherever my horse was. The bow landed on the crust of snow and slid until the string caught on a frozen branch, and I remembered Peasy two days ago, working his bowstring back and forth through the eyes of that blackhorn skull, and I wanted that again, please. Just daily chores to do. Meat to dry, wood to get, children to tie hoops for.

But soldiers were pouring from the trees now, leading with their many-shot guns, all of them yelling, their breaths white and cold, their eyes hot and mad, which is when Peasy stood shirtless from the snow he’d been hiding in there in front of the turned over wagon, his grey hair loose under his tall black hat, his death song in his throat, because Pikuni like him don’t die like Tall Dog and me. Pikuni like him die like in the stories.

All the soldiers pointed their guns at him from the story they were in, which is your American story, and they shot at once together, over and over, so Peasy was dancing in place.

Seeing Peasy die like that, in a way that mattered, in a way even the soldiers would tell about, I knew I had to try for my death song too. But I couldn’t get air inside, to sing back out. I was too scared, and the hole in my chest was cold fire, and it wasn’t my death song anyway, I know that now. I know it because, since this night in the Backbone, I’ve sung it so many more times, over and over, this song you should only ever be able to sing once.

Instead of dying all the way yet, I was on my knees, I was reaching out for Peasy, the old man, who was already dead but still standing somehow.

It was because he was still doing his last thing, for all Pikuni.

It was to drag his hand down over the latch of the Cat Man’s cage.

He was releasing our Great White God on these soldiers.

I nodded yes, yes, that this was how it had to be, this was all that was left. We were close enough to Chief Mountain, we had to be. This was where it could all start over again. This was why we’d found him.

Since we were all deaf from the shooting, none of us heard that iron latch.

But we all saw the Cat Man rush like a fast weasel over Peasy.

There were still thirteen soldiers standing when the cage opened.

The Cat Man, running on all fours, tore open the throat of the first and second soldiers before the third and fourth had even looked over, and then they were dead just the same, the first one’s face gone, the second’s whole head off, the stump of his neck welling with blood, the wet white of his bones and throat still bright for the moment, and the foggy yellow juice from his back spurting high, where his face had been.

I stumbled forward, fell over a dead soldier, came up with his many-shots gun, which was all I’d wanted from this.

I levered another round in, and it took me long enough that four more of the soldiers were already thrashing in the snow from the Cat Man, their blood spurting in the whiteness.

I wondered if those two long-leg bulls that had been off to the side were still watching.

I knew the beaver family was.

I screamed as loud as I could, even though I couldn’t hear my own voice, and shot into a soldier who looked over, my greasedshooter folding him over at the waist, and then I levered again, shot the soldier beside him too, and the Cat Man looked up to the man he had his mouth to, had been drinking from.

He was breathing hard, his eyes wild, his whole chest and stomach red and shiny and steaming, so I could tell at last he was no god. He was just a four-legged. He even ran like one of them. But he could speak like a two-legged.

“You,” he said in napikwan then, and I didn’t know your tongue yet, but I knew enough to hear this like he meant for me to. Or maybe I saw it in his eyes, staring into me.

I nodded yes, me, and brought my gun over to him right as one of the two or three soldiers left ran his sword up through the Cat Man’s heart from the front, while another shot him twice fast in the back, through what I knew had to be both lungs.

This had to be enough to kill him, I told myself.

I was wrong.

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