Vampires and Vengeance: Review of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
You haven’t read a book like The Buffalo Hunter Hunter before. This captivating, disturbing blend of vampire mythology and Indigenous history offers something new to the horror genre. Released on March 18, this nested narrative by Stephen Graham Jones holds a dark and cracked mirror to America’s genocidal past.
The story begins when Etsy Beaucarne, a junior professor desperate to get published and secure tenure, discovers the journal of her great-great-great- grandfather, Arthur, a Lutheran pastor in early 1900s Montana. Through his ornate Victorian prose, equal parts charming and suspect, we encounter Good Stab, a Blackfeet man whose weekly “confessions” make up the bloody third frame in Jones’s triptych.
Good Stab’s confessions unfold against the backdrop of the American West and the atrocities against Indigenous peoples, specifically the Marias Massacre, when approximately 200 women, children, and elderly men were killed in their sleep by the U.S. Army.
When Good Stab encounters American soldiers transporting a mysterious “Cat Man,” the chaos of battle leaves him bitten and transformed. He becomes what Arthur, reverting to his native German, calls the Nachzehrer – a vampire.
“What I am is the Indian who can’t die,” says Good Stab. “I’m the worst dream America ever had.”
Good Stab’s vengeance against white settlers becomes Jones’s most challenging narrative gambit. The relentless bloodshed of the middle section tests our endurance. The violence is deliberately excessive, forcing us to confront the scale of historical atrocities: the Marias Massacre, the decimation of Indigenous populations, the extinction of the buffalo. Jones makes us uncomfortable witnesses, denying us the luxury of looking away.
Life as a vampire is not easy. Good Stab suffers all manner of injury and oscillates between starvation and gluttony. He also endures psychological torment. Like the Cat Man, he slowly becomes the thing he feeds on, presenting him with an impossible choice: consume the very people he hopes to avenge or become the thing he hates most.
Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, isn’t spinning a supernatural revenge fantasy. Through Good Stab’s transformation, he explores how violence changes the avenger. The feeding metaphor captures how trauma can perpetuate itself across generations, with victims adopting the behaviours they once suffered under.
Some might find Arthur’s archaic language and Good Stab’s Blackfeet terminology difficult to parse. But these linguistic layers add authenticity and emotional weight to the story.
Arthur, in particular, is utterly charming. His penchant for good food and affection for the cat he rescues from a house of ill repute make him likeable. It’s all the more shocking, then, when he is revealed to be something of a monster himself. As he says, he “can be convincing when allowed to paint with words.” In this meta-commentary, Jones challenges us to question the narrative frame we’re reading, whose stories get preserved, who interprets them, and how appealing prose can disguise monstrous realities.
While The Buffalo Hunter Hunter may test readers’ endurance with its violence, Jones has created something unprecedented: a vampire narrative that uses horror conventions to expose America’s refusal to confront its bloody foundations. It’s not just a timely book, it’s a necessary one, suggesting that some historical debts can never be paid, only acknowledged. In Jones’s American Gothic, the real horror isn’t the monster but the country that created it.
Chris Greer is the co-owner of Nottawa Cottage Bookstore. He grew up in Creemore and has a degree in English from the University of Toronto.
