By Natascha Pearson
Jones, Stephen Graham. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. First Saga Press hardcover edition, Saga Press, 2025.

Stephen Graham Jones’s Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a historical horror novel that blurs the boundaries between myth, memory, and morality. Set across multiple timelines, it follows Pastor Arthur Beaucarne, who in 1912 records the confession of Good Stab, a Blackfoot vampire recounting his experience during the 1870 massacre of the Blackfoot people. As settlers destroy both Native lives and the buffalo that sustain them, Good Stab becomes a living symbol of survival, guilt, and decay.

Generations later, Etsy, Beaucarne’s great-great-great-granddaughter, discovers his logbook and, as a journalist, seeks to understand the past that haunts her family. Her search culminates in a confrontation with Good Stab himself—a scene that serves as both a power shift and a moral reckoning. With Good Stab’s identity and survival in her hands, Etsy must decide whether to end his life or allow him to continue feeding. Her choice becomes an allegory for agency, accountability, and inherited trauma.

The novel’s tone is brutal yet strangely meditative, combining the grotesque intimacy of horror with the restrained rhythm of oral storytelling. Jones describes the settlers’ violence toward the Blackfoot people and the buffalo with chilling precision, but Good Stab’s narration delivers these horrors with such calm that the reader feels both repelled and mesmerized. His storytelling maintains a balance between intimacy and distance, as if ritualizing pain into memory.

Good Stab’s voice grounds the story in Indigenous experience and language. Phrases such as

“Beaver Medicine wasn’t for me anymore” (115)
and
“…and my eyes are slitted down like this because I’m already looking ahead…” (41)
root the narrative in Blackfoot cadence and worldview. Even when recounting unspeakable acts, the tone remains measured, spiritual, and deliberate—echoing the endurance of a people who have seen everything taken from them and still continue.

Good Stab’s recurring reference to Pastor Beaucarne as “Three Persons—Father, Son, Creator” (28) interweaves Christianity and Indigenous spirituality, merging sacred language with horror. Jones collapses faith and flesh, the cross and the fang, into a single mythology. The calm precision of his prose heightens the horror:

“The hide-hunters pulled the boy’s pants down and bent him over one of their knees, and the other one dropped down behind him, was untying his pants that were sticky with blackhorn blood” (211).

The violence is shocking, yet the narration remains detached, forcing the reader to inhabit the same emotional distance the traumatized narrator does.

In classic Western stories, settlers are often the heroes, but Jones subverts this entirely. Here, the Native vampire—traditionally cast as the monster—becomes the moral center. The reader roots for Good Stab even as he drinks blood, because his existence reclaims power from the colonizers who destroyed his people. We come to trust him, even during the most brutal moments, as a vessel of justice and remembrance.

Jones also threads a powerful commentary on religion, assimilation, and identity. The vampire becomes an apt metaphor for colonization—feeding on the living, erasing culture, and leaving behind bodies stripped of spirit. After the massacres, Native survivors are forced into Christianity, captured in images of children dressed in Western clothes, their hair cut, their heritage erased. The transformation from free people to “civilized” captives mirrors Good Stab’s own curse—immortality as a form of damnation.

As a writer, I’m deeply inspired by Jones’s craft, particularly the way he merges historical realism with supernatural horror. In Discordia, I aim to draw from similar techniques—using rhythm, diction, and cultural voice to create immersive worlds that echo the truths of history. Jones’s prose captures the daily life, geography, and humor of the Blackfoot people in brief but powerful glimpses:

“This is how we’re born into the world, and this was what was happening to me, I was being born again, but not like the Black Robe said when he baptized all the Pikuni in Big River, when I was throwing up Whitehorn milk and Wolf Calf was patting me on the back and smoking his short pipe and chuckling” (95).

In just a few lines, he conveys rebirth, cultural duality, and embodied experience. His language carries both the sacred and the horrific, allowing the past to haunt the present without losing its humanity.

By drawing from Jones’s approach—merging brutality with stillness, history with myth—I hope to create worlds where horror and hope coexist, and where the act of storytelling itself becomes a form of survival.