Horror, History and Genre Mashup in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Reviewed by Emily Weedon
In the sprawling The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Steven Graham Jones takes on (plot spoiler) vampires, and uses a fair amount of (trigger warning) bloody, violent horror to probe the American Old West of McKinley and Manifest Destiny and genocide. Part of the factual backbone of his work is the Marias Massacre of Piegan Blackfeet Native by Army forces and Major Eugene Mortimer Baker. Jones is fueled into righteous revenge prose using the device of a vampire who started out as a Blackfoot man.
The book has a lot going for it, not least of all what drew me to want to read it: The West, The Indigenous and Vampires in a period setting make for a hell of a compelling draw. Jones is well known in the horror sphere and is a prolific, acclaimed writer.
The narrative starts off with a modern woman, Betsy, an academic. We then meet the narrator, her “Greatest Grandfather”, Beaucarne, a Lutheran minister. Beaucarne has left behind memoirs of his interviews (I said it) with a mysterious man, Good Stab. Good Stab is the true narrator of this story. The two previous narrators are literary hurdles the reader must clear to get into the good stuff.
Much of the novel is told through the overly loquacious Beaucarne. The attempt with his speech is a florid old-timey style of speaking. At times the construction of his pattern felt overwrought, to the point of caricature, and anachronistic – a modern person’s idea of what an old, rangy timer talks like. Much of the rest of the novel is told through the stop and start, chase rabbits down holes, many asides, and story-within-story approach of Good Stab who spares us no detail. Truly no detail appears too small to include. Jones has further set the formidable task for himself of not allowing the speaker to use Western words, often necessitating long descriptions using concepts of his time and culture to get ideas across. It took me forever to figure out what Dirty Faces, Small Big Mouths and other animals dubbed only by “authentic” names were. It’s an admirable effort but doesn’t make the story lift off the page. I am a fan of clear writing that gets out of the way of bigger ideas. Jones seems to prefer style over substance. Put this down to a preference thing.
Jones is servicing what has been billed as a horror and a vampire tale but a long time to get to the horror and spills much ink on a vampire learning to vampire. When something active like a chase between vampire and prey emerges, Jones makes no bones about interrupting the flow of the narrative with copious asides which simply murder the forward momentum and bog the story down.
Almost a page is dedicated to explaining what a yoke is, for example, even though the passage uses the word yoke, to show the colour of an early contact man trying to use limited language to convey a white man’s invention to his compatriots. Literature is as much what is chosen to be left out as is it is what to put in. I frequently found myself frustrated with this kind of momentum throttling. Detractor I may be here, Jones has plenty of fans who eat up his style. So if your thing is parsing peregrinations, read on with Jones. There’s much to parse.
For Horror genre lovers, structure is key. A great horror writer sets up a creeping dread and punctuates the narrative, usually about people just trying to live their normal lives, while an insistent presence or appearance from the supernatural intrudes, and then continues to make incursions with rising tempo and intensity. Jump scares and the unexpected are part of this. Jones is great at describing gore and violence, but gore and violence alone do not horror make. I found myself longing for plot points and pace.
For vampire purists, this is a solidly interesting idea with uneven application. Vampires need rules. I am ALL for bending the rules of what make a supernatural being tick, but I am a stickler for metrics that create logic in a vampire world. I had a similar quarrel with Quentin Tarantinos’ From Dusk Till Dawn. What kills Vampires? A stake? Beheading? Lots and lots and lots of shooting? For Tarantino, the sheer amount of bullets is what kills a supernatural, undead creature. For me, that’s a dodge of responsibly to genre. Jones picks and chooses: his vampire doesn’t like the sun, doesn’t seem to mind churches, has retractable teeth, is unkillable, but in one case a cannon bifurcating a body will do the trick.
What makes vampires endure as a genre is the juxtaposition of their needs with human needs even when their wants overlap. For this reason, the device of a human love interest continues to fuel the form. The struggle between the living and the dead, the problem of temporality and entropy trump even those tasty Victorian ideas of forbidden carnality and the power of religion. Vampires live forever. Those they love must die or be condemned to be the undead too. The vampire in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is not similarly lashed to a single person, because the work Jones is doing here is on the level of an entire people meeting genocide at the urge of another entire people.
This novel, because of the conditions and self-imposed challenges chosen by the writer, lacks fundamental stakes. If our “hero” is unkillable and they walk into a situation bristling with death and menace – there are no stakes. This is a flaw in construction and one that necessitates plot devices like Superman’s Kryptonite to overcome. Stakes must be made.
For lovers of Cormack McCarthy and hellscape imaginings of the Old West, this is a good entry, though without the soaring and searing verbiage of McCarthy, who might write long sentences but is never unclear. For Western aficionados, the addition of horror overcolours what is the great grandchild of the original Romances by Chretien De Troyes.
As a Canadian, I also have to ask: do I really want to read yet another iteration of Manifest Destiny, or the murderous plunder of the American West at this moment when it is Canada that is threatened? I posit the American myth of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness lies bleeding and all that remains is its voracious consumptions of resources of others.
The book is perhaps best suited for those interested in the retelling of grim history, revenge and horror and vampires through the lens of Indigenous voices, whatever bending and blending that involves. While I found Jones narrative style frustrating, his afterword prose sparkles. I was fascinated when the author wrote “Percival Everett’s Erasure is a big part of this too. I kept asking myself if I was doing a knock-off of My Pafology, just, minus the irony.” I’ll leave this to readers to decide for themselves. But what I found poignant, as a writer, was that Jones wanted to play with vampires, like all the other kids. Genre is fun to work with, to bend or twist until the breaking point.
The retracting teeth bit is interesting. Stoker does not use retracting teeth in his Dracula. This is conjecture, but my wager as someone who worked on film sets is that retractable teeth came about in film, not literature, because an actor wearing false teeth can’t present dialog, looks like they have an orange peel shoved in their mouth, etc. Retractable teeth give the special effects make up person a neat gig and explains to the audience why we see teeth only sometimes. In Jones’ work, the vampire is contrasted with the animals that are part of his natural world. This is one of the main strengths of the novel, in fact. But for some reason, his Blackfoot vampire has retractable teeth which feels tropey; right when I was starting to feel suspension of disbelief, it took something away for me.
The cadence of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is difficult. At over 400 pages, when I need to reread a sentence three or four times to understand what is being said, I get frustrated. For those who enjoy writing as puzzle, however, this is a complete world, one that demands the reader become immersed. A vacation read for the committed reader.
About the Author
Stephen Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and I Was a Teenage Slasher. He has been an NEA fellowship recipient and a recipient of several awards including the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and the Alex Award from American Library Association. He is the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.
About the Reviewer
Emily Weedon is a CSA award winning screenwriter and author of the dystopian debut Autokrator, with Cormorant Books. Her forthcoming novel Hemo Sapiens will be published in September 2025, with Dundurn Press. https://emilyweedon.com/
Book Details
Publisher : Simon & Schuster; Canadian edition (March 18 2025)
Language : English
Paperback : 448 pages
ISBN-10 : 1668095483
ISBN-13 : 978-1668095485