Jay
Great book, but a hard read. Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a heavy, visceral book that wrestles with the bloody legacy of American history. As such, it is deliberately not a comfortable read. (Spoilers below).
I generally find nested narratives overused, but the execution here is powerful. The story unfolds around a modern academic, Etsy, reading the 1912 journal of her ancestor, which in turn transcribes the confession of a Blackfeet vampire named Good Stab. It is a "story within a story within a story" format. Initially, it felt cluttered and I found it hard to navigate, but this forced me to slow down and actually sit with Jones's fantastic prose, especially when working through the archaic language. The structure is completely load bearing; removing the modern frame would turn this into a standard historical fantasy. A simple "what if vampires came to the American West in the 1800s". Instead, the frame grounds the atrocities of the past in the present, forcing you to recognize that the sins of your ancestors are still with us today.
The nesting isn't just structural; it is a thematic clash of mediums. Etsy’s first reaction to receiving this diary is to try to profit off of it. However, in one of her final acts, she destroys the journal. She isn't just trying to destroy the evidence of her ancestor's crimes; she is returning the truth-telling to Good Stab and the oral histories of the Blackfeet.
Where the novel truly shines is its brutal deconstruction of the "righteous vengeance" trope. Good Stab is an immortal who could have focused his power on systemic change or killing everyone involved in the massacre. Instead, his trauma manifests in extreme, localized cruelty. He tortures a single preacher for a century by feeding him prairie dogs, and senselessly murders his innocent children. Jones strips away the comforting myth of the "noble victim". There is no moral high ground here. Trauma is ugly, and the resulting cycle of violence is morally bankrupt. I kept waiting for a point for the cycle to break, for there to be a way out. But that's not what this book is doing.
Ultimately, the book's grotesque body horror acts as a profound postcolonial metaphor. The victims cannot simply kill the "heroic" image of their colonizers; they must expose them as the literal monsters they were. In the novel's climax, the act of severing the monster's head perfectly symbolizes our modern attempt to intellectually condemn the logic of colonialism. Yet, the body remains. This is a brilliant representation of the inherited privilege reaped from that colonialism, which simply cannot be buried or erased.
And this is why the nested story structure is so vital. The Blackfeet know that Arthur is a monster because they literally made him one. Using his own words to contextualize him and trying to create emotional distance by academizing his atrocities doesn’t change the truth when you choose to directly confront it. You might want to bury it, or cling to a DNA test to absolve yourself of 1/32nd of your guilt, but there you are: reading a land proclamation about having this meeting on stolen land, and feeling powerless to soothe your guilt.
It should be uncomfortable.
Great book, but a hard read. Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a heavy, visceral book that wrestles with the bloody legacy of American history. As such, it is deliberately not a comfortable read. (Spoilers below).
I generally find nested narratives overused, but the execution here is powerful. The story unfolds around a modern academic, Etsy, reading the 1912 journal of her ancestor, which in turn transcribes the confession of a Blackfeet vampire named Good Stab. It is a "story within a story within a story" format. Initially, it felt cluttered and I found it hard to navigate, but this forced me to slow down and actually sit with Jones's fantastic prose, especially when working through the archaic language. The structure is completely load bearing; removing the modern frame would turn this into a standard historical fantasy. A simple "what if vampires came to the American West in the 1800s". Instead, the frame grounds the atrocities of the past in the present, forcing you to recognize that the sins of your ancestors are still with us today.
The nesting isn't just structural; it is a thematic clash of mediums. Etsy’s first reaction to receiving this diary is to try to profit off of it. However, in one of her final acts, she destroys the journal. She isn't just trying to destroy the evidence of her ancestor's crimes; she is returning the truth-telling to Good Stab and the oral histories of the Blackfeet.
Where the novel truly shines is its brutal deconstruction of the "righteous vengeance" trope. Good Stab is an immortal who could have focused his power on systemic change or killing everyone involved in the massacre. Instead, his trauma manifests in extreme, localized cruelty. He tortures a single preacher for a century by feeding him prairie dogs, and senselessly murders his innocent children. Jones strips away the comforting myth of the "noble victim". There is no moral high ground here. Trauma is ugly, and the resulting cycle of violence is morally bankrupt. I kept waiting for a point for the cycle to break, for there to be a way out. But that's not what this book is doing.
Ultimately, the book's grotesque body horror acts as a profound postcolonial metaphor. The victims cannot simply kill the "heroic" image of their colonizers; they must expose them as the literal monsters they were. In the novel's climax, the act of severing the monster's head perfectly symbolizes our modern attempt to intellectually condemn the logic of colonialism. Yet, the body remains. This is a brilliant representation of the inherited privilege reaped from that colonialism, which simply cannot be buried or erased.
And this is why the nested story structure is so vital. The Blackfeet know that Arthur is a monster because they literally made him one. Using his own words to contextualize him and trying to create emotional distance by academizing his atrocities doesn’t change the truth when you choose to directly confront it. You might want to bury it, or cling to a DNA test to absolve yourself of 1/32nd of your guilt, but there you are: reading a land proclamation about having this meeting on stolen land, and feeling powerless to soothe your guilt.
It should be uncomfortable.