Buffalo Hunter, Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
448 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication March 18, 2025 Published by S&S/Saga Press
This is my third Stephen Graham Jones book this year. There is a funny thing that happens when prolific writers release a masterpiece. These are authors who ALWAYS release good stuff. Much like Josh Malerman released Incidents Around the House, James Reich unleashed Skinship, and Stephen Graham Jones released a novel that is just a six-star book, this novel has a “We Rate Dogs” scale of a 13/10 rating.
It will have a special place in my heart much like Skinship. I got a preview of it talking to the author in Colorado while at the Philip K. Dick Festival. Stephen joined us and Jonathan Letham on a live panel at a bookstore just a few blocks from Phil’s grave in Fort Morgan Colorado. Over a plate of french fries, I asked Stephen what he was working on at the moment. When he said he was doing final edits on a vampire set in the old west, in Blackfeet country, my jaw dropped. He talked about how he started it after teaching a Vampire fiction class, and about the painful editing process and how it was challenging him to the point where he felt like giving up. That intrigued me no doubt.
I know the Jade Daniels trilogy is very popular, and the rumor is I was a Teenage Slasher is great, I am just not a Slasher fan. I also LOVED the audio original Science Fictional haunted house novel The Babysitter Lives, and think Mongrels is a werewolf masterpiece. The Only Good Indian plays with ghosts and might still be my favorite SGJ novel. I couldn’t wait to read a SGJ novel that plays with the vampire mythos, and as dark and heavy as the themes are, my man was having a blast.
I was also honored to get the first interview for this novel, on the podcast you can hear it here. It is a strange feeling when reading the pre-release arc of a novel that you feel deep in your bones is a classic. In many ways, BHH feels like a classic already. If you don’t want to know anything going on, and I recommend that, take my word on it and pre-order, the review and the podcast will be here. There is much to talk about.
First and foremost let's say this, in the grand tradition of vampire novels there are many different takes. SGJ and I agree that it is valuable for every writer to try their hand at it. Speaking as someone who has written two of them myself, there are vampire novels that are just fun and then some that expand the mythology and become a part of the canon. I loved Mongrels and thought it was a fantastic Werewolf novel, Buffalo Hunter, Hunter needs to be in the canon of great vampire novels.
It is the unique product, of SGJ’s skill, knowledge, and cultural DNA that creates the masterpiece that absolutely no one else in the universe could write. Sold yet? You should be. Go make sure you have it as soon as you can on March 18, 2025.
Now we can
go a little deeper. Since this is written in letters and journal entries, SGJ
who doesn’t cheat makes sure the reader understands our narrator is an
excellent writer…
“I've worked my way through the first few days of your journal, though, and
I'm coming to understand why Bozeman wants to pay to keep your writing in their
collection. You were good, Arthur Beaucarne. You used my rhetoric and spin encomium
to come off sounding heartfelt, never mind the actual facts, but you had a documentarian’s
eye, too, didn't you? And a playwright's ear. You didn't have a camera, but you
had a pen, and its nib was sharp enough to cut right to the center of the day,
the year, the era.”
Any good author who commits to this type of first-person narrator needs to have a reason for us to forget that anyone other than the fictional narrator is involved. If the character has no business writing beautiful prose, yet they do it takes me out of the novel every time. SGJ doesn’t cheat and in fact, he plays with the set-up of a story within a story within a story. The novel opens with Arthur Beacarne’s memoir being found after a century hidden in a wall. I love the mythic feel of a story that stays hidden for a century.
Good Stab is a Blackfeet Indian who wandered in 1912 into a church after Sunday service and begins to tell his story that goes almost another century still. The telling of this tale is so perfect. The settings, and method of telling the tale already drips with vibes. It is a story that evokes the cold, the wet nastiness of the environment and many of the creeps fit perfectly into an oral tradition of horror tales.
“I was in my fourth winter when the white scabs came for us the second time when we should have hidden from it in the mountains like the crow. That's what these scars are from. They mean I lived. I was fourteen winters when so many of the Pikuni got baptized by one of you black robes, but I wasn't in the big river for that. I was sick from drinking whitehorn milk at the fort. My father had warned me not to, but I did it anyways. I was twenty-two winters by the time of lame Bul’s treaty on the Yellow River that gave us our hunting grounds for ninety-nine years, which still aren't over.”
This highlights one of the cool things about this novel, trying to be accurate about Blackfeet terms and thinking as a person of the time. Good Stab has lived for a long time on the plains, and he speaks as such. We always get it translated through Beaucarne whom Good Stab calls Three Persons. This confessional format has creepy vibes, it has thick tales of the Old West vibes. Keep in mind that this is a Western as much as it is a horror tale.
The set-up is not short, but it is meaningful, the vibes are a huge part of the horror bubbles over in the third act, but those who love the old west and horror vibes will soak in the first hundred pages. When it comes to the more traditional vampire elements. The Cat-man is our monster, (a vampire, although the word is never used) is found in a wagon train in a cage. This haunting image is one SGJ said he had in his mind long before the novel came together.
“It doesn't die, tall dog said, in wonder.
“It's one of their gods,” Peasy said, making it so.
“Burn him,” I said to Peasy and hunts to the side. “Cut him into many pieces, then burn him, then bury him. They'll be weaker without their God.”
He is a monster, and Good Stab his victim doesn’t understand what he has become. Is this playing with tropes or diving into tradition? Is it all in how you look at it? When Good Stab is turned that tradition of the vampire novel, and SGJ’s experience teaching radiates off the page. Every good novel is like a psychic connection to the author but Buffalo Hunter Hunter is like sneaking in the backdoor to SGJ’s vampire class. Sure, he is playing with topes but it is always through the unique style of this novel.
“This is how I died, with the cat man's blood slithering down across the crust of the snow, filling my eyes and nose and mouth, my blood leaking out of me from too many greased shooters, and 1 cold bite deep in my shoulder.”
The mythic powers of the vampire in Good Stab’s origin at times have the feel of comic books and superheroes which makes sense as SGJ spun out of ideas he was playing with in his Earthdivers comic book series.
“But at the same time, I was alive. And running so fast I couldn't stop.
Also, there was a taste in my nose, which I know you can think means i was smelling, but it was more than that. I had never tasted with my nose before. Not where every taste turned into a picture of itself. I could tell that a long-legs had passed there, and that a real bear was sleeping there, and then a family of dirty faces were living over there in a hole under a thick root. It made me dizzy and I had to shake my head from having to know so much all at once.”
I love the sense that the passage gives to being a vampire, it paints a picture of inhumanity, alienness, or an animal-like feeling that BHH’s vampires have. It makes them superior predators. This is one piece of the puzzle that adds to the creepy vibes. Those skills are used often in the novel to drive scenes and build suspense.
“The reason I hadn't smelled him on the soldier I drank was that the cat man didn't smell like a man anymore. He didn't smell like anything. Neither do I. I can stand right behind you in the darkness and I'm light enough the pine needles hardly crunch under my feet, and my smell won't tell you I'm there either. If you feel my breath on your neck, it's too late.
I don't mean you, Three persons. I mean anyone.”
If we'd met the cat man without his cage, none of us would have lived, and our bodies would have been added to the others at the wagon train, like they fought us off.”
The transformation makes him stronger but also alienates him from his people. Good Stab being Blackfeet is important because his understanding of the plains, of the blackhorns, of his people and that is key, that is part of the heartbreak. As a Cat-man, or vampire can he still be considered Blackfeet?
“I can no longer dream my own dreams,” he said quietly into his hands clamping tighter and tighter onto each other between his knees. “I can't live among my people anymore, I can't eat real meat or have a wife or children, I can't hunt the black horns since the black horns are all gone, and the horses know me for what I am.”
There is a moment of transformation for Good Stab that involves Buffalo calves, it was a part of the novel that was so powerful I almost missed my stuff. It turns Good Stab from just being another vampire to the title character and that was moving.
The last thing I want to say in this review is to highlight something Stephen and I talked about in the interview coming next week on the podcast. I told SGJ I always look for the mission statement, long time readers of my reviews or my podcast will know this. He said he often writes “the thesis” in the margin of books when he finds them.
Two parts spoke to me in this way.
“What I am is the Indian who can't die.
I'm the worst dream America ever had.”
and…
“This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead mutely witnessing.”
Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a miracle of a novel. I feel we all expected something good, and my bar was really high. Yes, this was one of the best novels I read in 2024 and it was fantastic. I kinda suspected it would be there, but what I was not expecting was a novel worthy of the canon of Vampire myths. That tradition is centuries long and Buffalo Hunter Hunter is worthy.
