‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’ Review: A Historical Horror Masterpiece from Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones has carved such a singular and bloody path through horror literature at this point that it almost sounds redundant to say he wrote another good book. In the years since his breakthrough novel The Only Good Indians became one of the most celebrated horror stories of the 21st century so far, Jones has released an unrelenting string of hits, including novellas, audio originals, and a whole trilogy of slasher stories, all of them devoured by a rabid fandom. So, of course, his latest book is good, right?
But there’s good, and then there’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
With this tale of righteous vengeance for one of America’s greatest sins, Jones has delivered not just the latest in a string of great books, but the book that might be his masterpiece. It’s a devastating, moving, sweeping historical epic that’s also one of the best vampire novels you’re ever likely to pick up. We expected something good, yes, but even by Jones’ standards, something exceptional has happened here.
Though the action of the novel all revolves around the 1870 Marias massacre of 200 Blackfeet by the U.S. military, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter actually begins in 2012, when a woman named Etsy Beaucarne unearths a century-old journal belonging to her ancestor, the minister Arthur Beaucarne. Amid her efforts to digitize and decipher the crumbling pages, Etsy uncovers an unbelievable tale of violence and mystery in the Mountain West just after the turn of the 20th century, when Arthur encountered a strange Blackfeet man known only as Good Stab.
From here, Jones turns the tale over to Arthur, who relates his own connection to a string of brutal murders around his small community, then devotes page after page of his journal to Good Stab’s own story. The Blackfeet claims he’s decades older than he looks, a vampire cursed to feed on blood who’s decided to take that curse out on the buffalo hunters who ruined his people’s way of life. But is he telling the truth? And what does he know about Arthur’s own dark past?
Readers coming to this novel first and foremost to see Jones’ take on vampire lore will not be let down, because The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is both a recognizable take on the monster and a departure from some of the key tenets of past incarnations. Jones’ vampires are engines of pure appetite, who feed sometimes until they literally burst because they can’t stop themselves, then rest sometimes for days to let all that blood settle into their bodies.
They’re also, crucially, cursed to carry the physical traits of whatever they feed on, which means that if Good Stab is to retain any shred of the Blackfeet warrior he was, he must eventually ponder feeding on his own people. It’s a crucial, devastating tweak to the classic conundrum of what it means to be a blood drinker, and it transforms The Buffalo Hunter Hunter from an interesting twist on a subgenre to an all-out reinvention.
In interviews, Jones has noted that for him, the vampire has transcended all of its original metaphorical power, becoming a self-referential monster through years of popularity. That means in this novel, Good Stab and his vampirism are not a stand-in for the spreading of colonizer plagues or genocide, but instead an engine of wish fulfillment. Using the very real, very brutal Marias Massacre as a backdrop gives Jones all the jet fuel he needs to send the historical fiction that drives Good Stab into the highest possible gear. As the title suggests, once he understands what his powers can do, the Buffalo Hunter Hunter does not let up in his quest to collect some measure of justice for what’s been done to his people.
Longtime Jones readers know that he’s an author with a knack for originality in his violence, and that still holds true here, with sequences of gore that carry not just unforgettable imagery, but tremendous meaning, from blood-soaked buffalo corpses to one sequence involving a cave that’ll go down in history as one of the best setpieces Jones has ever written. His vampire, and that vampire’s endless appetite, is tasked with extracting maximum blood both for food and for justice, and he does not disappoint.
But Good Stab, and the novel itself, also quickly delineates a difference between the creature of appetite that is the Buffalo Hunter Hunter and the sensitive, ageless, wearied person who’s been forced to carry the wounds of his people into a new century. For all its creative violence and cinematic Western drive, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is also a novel capable of intense, contemplative quiet, as Good Stab and Arthur get to know each other and Arthur slowly comes to grips with the reality of the story he’s hearing.
Jones, a master of prose voices, renders Arthur just as three-dimensionally as Good Stab. The depth of characterization (including Arthur’s often hilarious and ultimately meaningful habit of gorging himself on food gifted by his parishioners) and understanding for both characters means that scenes of simple conversation flow just as smoothly as moments of gruesome detective work and outright violence. Jones has long been the kind of writer who can make something as simple as a character portioning out slices of bread and jam into an endlessly compelling exploration of the psyche. He uses that gift to full advantage in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, drawing out the novel while sacrificing none of its horror punch.
But what sticks with you most after reading this book is the way Jones, without ever dropping into authorial sermonizing or solipsism, packs every inch of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter with meaningful questions that, for centuries now, have avoided easy answers. This is a book that filters the narrative of a Blackfeet saddled with a bloody curse through two generations of white Europeans and invites readers to ponder what that means. It’s a book that, like The Only Good Indians before it, engages with the ritual and the tactile quality of the hunt and asks the reader to examine what they’d do when faced with questions of basic sustenance so great they carry the fate of entire populations.
It’s a book that asks what faith means when the very presence of another being shakes that faith, a book about the atrocities of the West and the easy comfort that comes from simply letting those atrocities pass us by, a book about what it means to carry generational wounds with you forever, always looking for relief, never quite finding it. This novel is all that, plus a relentlessly entertaining vampire novel, too. That makes The Buffalo Hunter Hunter not just another great Stephen Graham Jones, but quite possibly the great Stephen Graham Jones book.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is available now wherever books are sold.
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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Categorized:Reviews
