BOOK REVIEW | THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER | STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

 BOOK REVIEW | THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER | STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

ABOUT THE BOOK 

A chilling historical horror set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. Perfect for fans of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab and Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice. 

Etsy Beaucarne is an academic who needs to get published. So when a journal written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor and her grandfather, is discovered within a wall during renovations, she sees her chance. She can uncover the lost secrets of her family, and get tenure.

As she researches, she comes to learn of her grandfather, and a Blackfeet called Good Stab, who came to Arthur to share the story of his extraordinary life. The journals detail a slow massacre, a chain of events charting the history of Montana state as it formed. A cycle of violence that leads all the way back to 217 Blackfeet murdered in the snow.

A blood-soaked and unflinching saga of the violence of colonial America, a revenge story like no other, and the chilling reinvention of vampire lore from the master of horror.

REVIEW

We all know that the worst thing to happen to the indigenous people of America was the discovery of the Americas by white Europeans, which Jones dealt with admirably in his comic Earthdivers. However, what struck the death knell of the Native Americans was the expansionist policies of eradicating the primary food source for those that lived there.

Set at the turn of the century, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter tells three stories in one. Firstly, the story of Etsy Beaucarne, who provides the springboard for the frame within a frame tale of vampirism and revenge. After being handed a diary by her great great grandfather Arthur Beaucarne, she hopes that this will provide her with the springboard to gain a tenure at a local university. However, as she starts to read, she falls into the story of her Grandfather, Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutherian priest in Mile City who becomes fascinated by a Native American parishioner who only comes to visit him once a week. The man tells him that his name is Goodstab and that he would like to give the priest his confession.

Telling the story of both Arthur and Goodstab in parallel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a bloody, revenge soaked history of the expansion of the American people that centres on asking who gets to tell stories of violence - and who gets to pay the price for them. 

In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Graham embraces all influences from vampire fiction to create a unique and thoroughly disturbing alternative history of the Americas through the eyes of the people who established the nation prior to white Europeans landing on its shores. Gone is the fanciful mythmaking of frontiership and steadfastness that epitomises the tales of the wild west. Instead, we see the monsters that brutally carved and shaped the land, ultimately subjugating the original inhabitants and appropriating them through the systemic brutalization of the land they lived on and the people that lived there.

Filled with harrowing, brutal and visceral imagery, Jones shows the devastation the invaders wrought both on the macro level and the micro level. Using the Marias Massacre of 1870 to propel the story, Jones embraces the epistolary format of Stoker to build menace and atmosphere. However, unlike both Rice and Stoker, Jones’s vampire is a complex and layered individual. Unlike Louis in Interview with a Vampire, Goodstab is unrepentant at his use of violence and the vampirism that is at the heart of him is used as an extension of his rage and uselessness at the expansion of the invading Europeans as they decimate the land and the people in the name of progress. In addition to this, what distinguishes the book from more conventional historical fiction is its refusal to offer easy moral distance from the events that happen on the page.

At times, the book risks suffocation under its own atmosphere and the pace is deliberate to the point of severity that will find readers that are looking for narrative propulsion often frustrated (like me!) with the story, and the epistolary format can feel standoffish at times. There were many times that I hovered with the decision to DNF this book. However, if patient, the reader will be rewarded as the narrative strands weave together in a sublime crescendo. 

Ultimately, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a sharp, intelligent dismantling of the American myth of frontiership and progress building that surgically peels back the layers to show the blood and bone that a nation stands on and that the past is never past, and that through different eyes a different, often far more brutal truth emerges. 

Oh, and to bring this review full circle back to the beginning, there is a nice little nod to Earth Divers as Jones has a character in both these stories called Yellow Kidney. I don’t know if this is an ancestor of the one in Earthdivers, but it did make me smile.