A review by eggcatsreads
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

4.5

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

SGJ continues to be the absolute best at slow-burn horror, and TBHH keeps him on that pedestal. Told mostly through journal entries from 1912, we follow as a Lutheran pastor gets a confession he never expected to hear - and faces the consequences of the choices he’s made.

With a fresh take on the vampire genre and a creeping historical narrative that would fit next to Dracula, this book forces you to confront the bloody history of America and its treatment of the native Americans who were here first. Bloody and compelling, we can’t help but sympathize with the actions of Good Stab even when he leaves a trail of bodies behind him in his wake. 

I also loved the interpretation of the vampire within this novel, and how one specific thing affects those who are afflicted with the condition. When we finish with the journal entries that one specific trait suddenly becomes front page and center, and we are confronted with a type of body horror that - while mentioned - was always relegated to the back-burner before this point. 

My only issue is that I wasn’t as familiar with the history as I wish I was before getting into this novel, as well as I wished there were a translation guide for some of the words Good Stab uses to describe his narrative. The book does an excellent job of not holding your hand throughout, but with some of the names for the animals used I wished there was a way for me to look up a translation, as in many ways Google was unhelpful. (Some words are given definitions, like I now know that dirty-face means mouse, but others were not or I had missed it during my read-through.) This didn’t take away my enjoyment of this novel, only that in some ways I had difficulty understanding what exactly was going on, as I wasn’t sure which animal was actually being described here. 

A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, and Saga Press for providing this e-ARC.