A Vampire, a Massacre, and a Confession You’ll Never Forget

Stephen Graham Jones has done it again, delivering a gut-punching masterpiece that leaves you breathless and questioning the very soil beneath your feet. Why, Stephen? WHY? This isn’t just a novel, it’s a haunting séance of blood, betrayal, and unrelenting grief. From a 1912 pastor’s dusty diary to the chilling voice of Good Stab, this is the untold story of Blackfeet justice and the creeping shadows of the American West. And Weasel Plume? Don’t even get me started. If you’re not weeping, are you even human? Or... vampire?

Read it. Or you’ll regret missing one of the most visceral, unforgettable stories you’ll ever encounter.

This was a let down for me, I've never read a SGJ novel and was hoping to get into his work with this story. The problem for me was the prose and pacing of this story, I only made it to 20% before giving up. The book is written from several perspectives starting with a women from the current era reading a journal from the 1800's. The journal entries are from her great great grandfather who is recalling confessions from a Native American from earlier in his life. This is where most of the story comes from, the recounts from her relative writing from the concessioner's perspective. He writings the journal entries as the Native American man would have been speaking, which is done well, but that was where my problem was at. The prose is slow and disjointed and makes for a boring story in my opinion. When something kind of interesting started to happen I kept reading along waiting for the energy to capture me and draw me in, but it just never happened, it never grabbed me and made me want to keep reading. My TBR list is far too long to spend too much time and energy on some writing that isn't grabbing me and making me want to continue reading. This might not be a problem for some readers and this is fine, but for me this is a pass.

Stephen Graham Jones can’t help himself, he just keeps writing slashers.

I know, I know, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a vampire western, sure, and yes, it is that. A Lutheran Preacher is visited each Sunday by a strange Indian who wishes to make his “confession,” and the story he tells is a supernatural revenge tale full of violence, body horror, and endless, endless grief. Good Stab, as we come to know him, describes a run-in with an inhuman creature in the Montana mountains, somewhere around 1870. He survives this altercation, but is bit, and soon his body begins to go through terrifying changes, most notably, an insatiable craving for blood.

This familiar vampire origin story (bearing a great deal of familiar werewolf tropes to boot) quickly transforms into something much less familiar. Graham Jones quickly reinvents the vampire while still honoring its Eastern European roots. In fact, one might say that vampirism is just one more plague brought by colonial expansion (but you’ll have to read to see just how and why).

Good Stab sees his new nature as a curse, and there’s little new about that, but it’s a double curse for him because it separates him from every form of tradition and fellowship. To be a monster is to be cut off from your people, from your stories, from the very animals. He lives like a beast for some time, purposeless and grieving.

And then the massacres happen. At the Center of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is the horrific Marias Massacre, in which some two-hundred Blackfeet (mostly women and children) were slaughtered by U.S. forces. The reverberations of this event are felt through every page. The second massacre is that of the Buffalo themselves, hunted for their robes and left not only rotting in the sun but laced with poison, making the meat unusable to native people and poisoning the wolf population.

Good Stab recognizes these events for what they are: the end of the world. He is watching a genocide play out before his eyes, and he chooses to use his supernatural powers to wreak revenge.

Which isn’t to say that Good Stab is a “good vampire.” He is driven by an unstoppable hunger, and the details of Graham Jones’ vampire cosmology leads our hero to feed most often on his own people, an event that is heartbreaking and damning each time it happens. Because no matter what he does, Good Stab is caught up in the vast machinery of colonialism, and no one gets out unscathed.

So, what about my initial claim that The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is, in essence, a slasher? It ticks all the boxes: an unstoppable, unkillable killer who murders the guilty and innocent alike; a traumatic event that spurs the slasher’s vengeance; even a Michael Meyers-esque penchant for staging his kills like a director setting the stage. Add in the fact that in I Was a Teenage Slasher (Graham Jones’ other attempt at showing us the world through the slasher’s eyes) we’re treated to the conceit that slasherdom is itself a blood-borne curse, and there’s a perfect through-line.

But while Teenage Slasher was a fun romp that culminated in a poignant conclusion, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter will pull out your heart and stomp on it. It also happens to be Graham Jones’ greatest accomplishment thus far: a novel of incredible scope and emotional resonance that works its allegory so seamlessly into the telling that it no longer resembles allegory. A horror story about the impossibility of redeeming our history, it is, in short, a masterpiece.

This was so damn good. Historical fiction and vampires, I had to pick this one up early.
It's devastating, heartbreaking, stressful, horrific, brutal, gruesome, funny... everything you expect from SGJ.

The page count on this says 448? It honestly didn't feel like it, but I would have read 600+ pages. Loved the storytelling, the back and forth timelines made this impossible to put down. This is in my top ten of 2024.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the e-arc!

The premise of a Native American vampire was fascinating. I was very invested in that characters perspective. Where it got tricky for me are the other point of views. It was kind of hard to read. There are different timelines as well, so I had a hard time keeping things cohesive in my head. This could be better as an audiobook with specific voices for each perspective and timeline.

This story was a breath of fresh air. A journal from 1912 is uncovered and tells the story of a vampire haunting the mountainous plains of Montana during the American Frontier. I have always seen vampire stories from the point of view of a European. To view a vampire’s world through a Native American perspective was unique and intriguing. It really amplified the monstrosity of vampires to the natural world. There was no forgiveness, just full on rage. Stephen has outdone himself with this one.

Thank you, thank you, thank you netgalley and S&S for this incredible eARC!

Almost Nabokovian in style, the story within a story within a story of Good Stab, the nachzehner (vampire) who takes revenge on those who massacred the buffalo and starved his people defys classification. Graham Jones continues to write epic horror with literary aploumb, and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a masterclass. Etsy Beaucarne is altered when a diary purporting to be from her ancestor is found in the walls of an old house. Trying to earn her place in academia, Etsy begins to transcribe the story told by a priest who shares her name, who tells the story of a man who is known by many names and feared by one - Takes No Scalps. If you weren't already drawn in by the idea of a Native vampire bent on revenge, I can't help you, but if you give this a read your mind will be blown.

I'm crying and I don't even know why? This was so good. Not just the vampire part, which was so different and interesting, but just the whole story was tragic and bloody and slow and just reached in and grabbed me. At times humourous ("house of ill repute" cat is my fav) and at times violent and bloody (that church scene though), and I don't know how SGJ can write horror that both haunts you and makes you cry but he's so good at it. I will be thinking about this for a long time and processing for a long time (I need to go sit and stare at a wall until I can function again).

If you picked this up or considering picking this up because you think "ooo vampires, fun!" Stop. This is not what you think. This is wild and some scenes will forever haunt me. If you have read a SGJ book before then you have an idea of what to expect. If not, please look up trigger warnings.

Inititially, I was so conflicted reading this. I just couldn't establish if I liked it or not. There were terms I didn't understand and at times it was a bit repetative. All that aside, I couldn't put it down. This is a very dense slow burn so I did my best to stick with it and boy was I not disappointed. SGJ has completely outdone himself. The writing, characters, twists and turns in this were top notch and while I can't say this was a particularly enjoyable read, it is one of SGJs best.

A solid story and original plot but felt like something was definitely missing. The prose was well written but needed to be more efficient in terms of pacing. 3 stars

If I could give this book six thousand stars, I would. I stand by the fact that Stephen Graham Jones is nothing short of a literary genius. The way he utilizes the horror genre to shine light on dark topics of history and human nature (as well as inhuman nature) is truly a treat to read. I had to take this one a few chapters at a time because of the amount of gore but it paid off in the end and I was hooked on every single word. I cannot wait until this is published so I can get my hands on a physical copy and annotate the hell out of it!

This narrative is an absolute nightmare in the most compelling way. It offers a distinctive and engaging take on a vampire story while encompassing much more. The storytelling is intelligent, deliberate, and decidedly unsettling.

This book was a thoroughly engaging dive into vampire lore. Indigenous history mixed with supernatural horror is not a combination I would have expected, but it made for an amazing story.

I feel like I need more time to digest this one but this was such a good book. It took me a little bit to get into at first, adjusting to the way the characters spoke, but I was hooked once cat man showed up. Very sad at parts but extremely well written and thought provoking. I’ve added all of Stephen Graham Jones books to my TBR!

Holy smokes. This book. I got an ARC of this book through Netgalley and was really excited to start it. Stephen Graham Jones is one of the most impressive horror writers that I've ever read, and a book about vampires? I was already sold. His telling of history through the eyes of a Lutheran pastor along with the confession of a strange indigenous man is like a beautifully written song, with scary stuff scattered throughout. The twists and turns are perfect, and I feel so pleased by all of it. Not only that but that's the narrative within the narrative because this journal is found over a hundred years later and brought to light when it was sent to the pastor's great great-grandaughter. History brought to the present in more ways than one, it's like Dracula with a whole new cast of characters and ones I kind of like better. Read it. It's amazing.

4.5 stars rounded up.

Stephen Graham Jones is an author I keep coming back to, because his books will either be a new favorite or they will be something that might not resonate with me completely, but I still know I'll be getting a memorable experience. I was very grateful to receive an early review copy of this one, even if I was a bit apprehensive going in because I'm typically not a fan of Historical Fiction. But the vampire aspect absolutely interested me!

Honestly, it took a long time to get used to the prose since I never read this genre, and the narration is written in a very specific dialect and tone. Both the POV of the Native American character, Good Stab, and the Lutheran preacher Arthur are written out in their very specific vocal patterns. This is certainly an achievement, but for a while I had a tough time understanding some of what was being said and even some of the plot itself. I've seen some reviewers note that they struggled specifically with figuring out what Good Stab meant when he used words like "Pointy Ears" to mean "horse," for example, but the context clues would help with this. It's the sort of writing that requires your full attention, and I did have to go back and read passages more than once to make sure I didn't misinterpret things. Luckily, it got easier. And once I learned the rhythm of things, I became much more invested. The sections narrated by Good Stab were more interesting to me than the ones told by Arthur, for the most part. (At least until closer to the end, when all sorts of Hell broke loose!)

Several different people are credited with saying various iterations of the phrase: “A story is only as good as its villain.” If that's the case, this story is strong as steel. It has more than one cruel and easy to hate bad guy, the kind of intimidating force that feels unstoppable. Good Stab is up against a lot of adversity, as well as having to deal with the monster within himself.

I thoroughly enjoyed discovering how the rules of these vampires worked. It was my favorite part of this book. There were some unique aspects I hadn’t seen before, which is no small feat. And the way Good Stab discovers his vampiritic traits happens organically within the story. Every time I discovered something new about Jones' unique version of this iconic monster, I was impressed by the creativity. Jones made vampires his own, and he even addresses this in the Afterword (which also includes many interesting bits of info about his writing process for this novel.) It's probably one of the more interesting Afterwords I've read in a while. 

The plot of this book went to WILD places I did not expect. I won't spoil anything, but there was what I can only vaguely describe as “Tusk” coded body horror, and that was what pushed my rating so high. The story is NOT for the faint of heart. I would maybe even go so far as to say that this is the most horrific of SGJ's books that I've read. It's incredibly violent and painfully bleak. There were moments that were truthfully difficult to read. But that was the point. Everyone suffers here, from the humans to the animals. Physically, mentally, spiritually. You as the reader must sit with it, feeling like a dying thing is writhing in your lap but there's nothing you can do about it but watch. There’s beauty, too. And horror fans will be handsomely rewarded. I did feel like I had to put the work in, due to how everything was written, but it also felt above my personal skill level as a reader even after all this time, so others may not have the same experience.

Why did I give it a 4.5, then? Well, mostly because I struggled so much in the beginning to get into it, and because of the density of the prose. Also: while Etsy’s part in the story made sense and served a purpose, her “quirky GORL” persona wore thin quickly. Her appearances in the plot served as bookends, in a way, and by the time she popped back up I had admittedly forgotten all about her. But Jones absolutely nailed the ending, leaving me with something unexpected and meaningful that will stay in my mind for a long time.

SGJ poured his heart and soul into this, and it shows. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it a masterpiece. It feels deeply personal. I do admit that there were moments in the “Third Act” when for me the dialogue bordered on melodrama, but I can forgive that easily based on the subject matter. (As a sidenote: I'm not sure if Jones will be reading this himself for the audiobook, but if not it would be an excellent opportunity for vocal talent to perform these roles.) I highly recommend this book to any horror fans who don't mind a "complicated" read and can handle the subject matter.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and to the Publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review! All opinions are my own.

<3 <3 <3 Weasel Plume <3 <3 <3

Biggest TW: Animal harm/death, Rape, Racism

4.25/5⭐️
I really enjoyed this book, I think it’s one of my favorites by SGJ that I’ve read so far. The way SGJ can take a classic horror character like a vampire and twist and turn and make it so unique and fit in with the Blackfeet was fabulous, one of the best things SGJ has worked up. I must say the core of this novel, the alternating chapters of The Absolution of Three-Persons and The Nachzerher’s Dark Gospel was perfect, no notes there; the tone, the alternating voices and plot lines, the dread and slow burn, the history and current (to Arthur Beaucarne) events, the mood and scene setting really pulled you in, all of it well done. The subtle, and not subtle, commentary on the genocide and colonization of Indians by white settlers was eye-opening and great as always.

My issue is with the rest of the novel, is that I did not care for Etsy and that storyline. In the acknowledgments SGJ’s states that some friends told him “Etsy’s frame story as it used to be wasn’t working, which made [him] have to look into that opening and closing, set at last that she wasn’t just a story-delivered, she was the story.” Unfortunately, as written the she still reads as the story-teller not the story. Which I think would have been fine if it was flushed out more, maybe if there was a break sooner from her reading the journal and showing us how that felt at the moment versus writing her thoughts on it down after. Or if SGJ did use her in more of a traditional storyteller sense, I think it would’ve been perfect. As is though Etsy and that storyline seem like an afterthought, that the publishers told him he couldn’t just write the story of Good Stab and Arthur.

With that being said though, this book was still phenomenal. The story of Good Stab and Arthur was so phenomenal that it didn’t matter that the rest fell flat. Take a bow Stephen, this novel is special.

Such a good and unique take on a "vampire story." But also so much more than that. Not really sure what to say about this book that doesn't give away the best parts. I struggled a little bit at the beginning of the book with the Blackfeet names for different places/animals, but once I got the hang of those terms/phrases it wasn't an issue. This book was a "slow burn" type of read in all of the good ways to interpret that phrase. It was sunk its' fangs into me and never let go until the end. At times it was sad, scary, gruesome and "peek through your fingers" tense, but always engaging and interesting. The bottom line is Stephen Graham Jones is one of those authors that no matter what he writes next, I will definitely be reading it.

I'm a little torn on this book. I appreciate it, but I'm not sure I enjoyed it. Having a story told from the POV of a Native American from the 1800s was not something that I have experienced in the past. Unfortunately, I found the book to be repetitive at times, and parts of it were a slog to get through. But I can appreciate a novel take on a vampire story, and this was definitely not a story I had read before. Thanks to NetGalley for the early copy.

DNF @ 25%
I gave this a fair shot, but unfortunately this book confirmed that Stephen Graham Jones' writing is just not for me. I find it to be confusing and obtuse, and although his books have interesting plots and important social commentary, I just cannot get past the writing to enjoy them.

If you are a fan of Stephen Graham Jones, I think you will still like this. If you are interested by the premise, pick it up.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.