The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Emily's Review

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a groundbreaking, atmospheric horror novel from best-selling author Stephen Graham Jones. It tells the story of how Etsy Beaucarne, who after struggling for years to achieve the coveted position of tenured professor, makes a discovery that she believes is an academic holy grail: her great-great-great grandfather Arthur’s 1912 journal, which she sets about transcribing. Arthur, a Lutheran pastor in Montana during the state’s formative years, records his investigation into a macabre series of murders and mutilations taking place in his small-town community. Around the same time, he meets a Blackfeet Native American man named Good Stab, who asks Arthur to chronicle his exceptionally unconventional life story. Good Stab provides his sickeningly personal account of one of colonial America’s biggest massacres: the Marias Massacre, during which over 200 Blackfeet men, women and children were slaughtered. Having been immortalised by an encounter with a vampiric entity referred to as the Cat Man, Good Stab bears witness to the countless intergenerational effects of colonisation on Indigenous communities and the environment, all of which are unflinchingly recounted. As Good Stab’s story nears its end and more bodies are discovered throughout the town, Arthur must come to terms with his country’s violent history and his own part in it.

When I started reading this book, I considered the vampire horror genre to have been done to death (no pun intended), but Jones has breathed new life into it through his unique reinvention of traditional vampire lore. Using an Indigenous perspective, Jones turns the supernatural into something grounded in the very depths of the natural world. Where many vampiric stories come across as dreamlike and mystical, this novel is brutally down-to-earth. Though historical fiction can sometimes feel dense, Jones’s plot is layered and engaging. The story is simultaneously woven together and unravelled, and it culminates in a violently cathartic peak. 

Jones draws on his own experience to provide a deeply reflective work on what it fundamentally means to be Indigenous, and how an individual’s identity is heavily influenced by his or her community. He asks: without your community — your family, your friends, your culture as a whole — who are you? Do you maintain your inherent personhood after everything else has been stripped away, and more importantly, do you want to? Good Stab’s grief and rage at the imperialists who stole his people’s land, drove their animals to extinction and erased their way of life is the only thing that keeps him sane as his sense of self crumbles. His story drives home the point that colonisation is not an isolated event but a continuous cycle of suffering. As Good Stab himself says about Arthur’s crucifix: “You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder”.  

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a gritty, blood-soaked story of revenge: the Great American Novel as you’ve never seen it before. Because it deals with heavy topics in a highly graphic way, I recommend reader discretion.