Looking For a Good Book

What happens when a vampire confronts a minister in the American West of 1912? Confession.

Discovered in a wall is a journal of a Lutheran pastor who detailed his encounters with a man who’d once been known as Good Stab, of the Blackfeet Nation. In great detail, the pastor recounts Good Stab’s story in his own language. At first this is out of surprise and curiosity, but as the pastor begins to believe and understand that Good Stab is not telling some embellished story of a warrior coming of age. He really is struggling with what he has become and the pastor has sympathy for his unusual transformation.

But as the days go by, the white man learns to fear Good Stab. He knows his power and his anger at what has been done to his people – and now Good Stab is able to fight back.

I’ve not read anything by Stephen Graham Jones prior to this, but I’d been hearing and reading about the author in general and this book in particular.

Typically, I’m not a fan of the epistolary form of storytelling, but then typically I don’t read books quite as good as this. While the book is written as journal entries by the Lutheran pastor (mostly), he’s using the journal to relay someone else’s story as told to him. This gives the reader a chance to hear Good Stab’s story, but we also get some insight into the story, but the transcriber. It is cleverly done and very well handled.

Good Stab, being Indigenous in this era, uses his familiar terms for things as he tells his story. I found this enthralling. It told us so much about the character without having to TELL us about the character. It put us in the correct time and place and reminded us who Good Stab is.

Good Stab is quite self-aware and we never get the sense that he is an unreliable narrator. Just the opposite in fact. “I’m the one who killed Beaver Chief’s people,” he tells the pastor, he refers to as Three-Persons. “I’m the one with the Cat Man inside me. I’m the one who has to drink the blood of my people, just so I can keep drinking that blood.” He often seems angry at himself, at his situation, and at Cat Man (from whom he became what he is, due to an accident). “What I am is the Indian who cannot die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

I loved the growing horror in the pastor’s narrative as he reflects on what Good Stab tells him and his expectation that he will meet a dark fate:

At the same time, Good Stab’s acceptance of who he is and his thirst for vengeance – for himself and for his people – grows.

The word vampire never appears, but the savvy reader knows exactly what Good Stab is, and that is part of the charm of Jones’ writing. He doesn’t lay anything out, clearly and directly, in front of the reader. He respects the intelligence of his readers and lets us explore and understand. This style reminds me a lot of Roger Zelazny’s writing.

Sometimes the buzz about a book is real and not just made up by a publicity department. That would certainly be the case here.

Looking for a good book? The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is a deliciously dark vampire story set in the American Old West.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

author: Stephen Graham Jones

publisher: S&S/Saga Press

ISBN: 9781668075081

hardcover, 448 pages