The dish

Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter might be the most overtly violent novel I’ve ever read; it certainly is if measured by the volume of blood spilled, since it’s a vampire story at its core, but one Jones uses to retell the story of the Marias Massacre, in which U.S. troops killed about 200 Piegan Blackfeet women, children, and infirm or elderly men who were in their undefended camp. It’s a story of revenge and grief and the endless toll of genocide, where the American colonizers saturated the ground of the west with the blood of humans and buffalo, and where the vampire is both hero and monster, avenging his people while leaving destruction and death everywhere he goes. (It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel this year.)

The novel opens in the present day, as Etsy Beaucarne, a professor trying to complete a research paper that will improve her tenure application, obtains a long-hidden manuscript that was written by her great-great-grandfather Arthur Beaucarne, a pastor in Miles City, Montana, in 1912. A desecrated corpse was just found outside Miles City, and another will be found shortly, with no clues at all as to who has killed these men or why. Arthur is then visited by a peculiar Native American man named Good Stab, who wears sunglasses all day, who refuses to eat or drink what Arthur offers, and who says that he is there to confess, apparently familiar with the Catholic sacrament of penance. Over the course of many days, Good Stab describes how he was killed by a white man, but lived, thanks in some way to the supernatural powers of the vicious killer known as the Cat Man, and went on to become a vampire – almost immortal, feeding only on blood, but in this case taking on some characteristics of the creatures on which he feeds, with the blood of his own people the most powerful for healing and for providing him with strength and energy. Good Stab begins his undead life as an instrument of vengeance for the Blackfeet people and the buffalo, killing every trapper and hunter he finds and destroying their traps and weapons to prevent others from using them, but as time goes on, he becomes more wanton in his killing until an eventual Boss Battle with Cat Man himself that takes place over several years.

Meanwhile, Arthur has his own demons; he has not killed, but he was there at the Marias Massacre, and is carrying a heavy load of guilt and shame for his failure to do anything to stop the murders of innocents, which in turn led him to take up the cloth as a form of penance of his own. His voice is quieter than Good Stab’s, and he is especially weak next to the superhuman strength of his penitent, but he stands in as the voice of those who stood by and watched as their fellow colonizers wiped out entire peoples across the Americas along with decimating the buffalo population.

Jones chooses an epistolary-adjacent format – they’re not truly letters, but Good Stab’s soliloquies interrupted by diary entries from Arthur – in what I presume is an homage to Stoker’s Dracula, an epistolary novel itself that comprises letters and diary entries as well. Where Stoker’s vampire is pursuing women in a sort of sexual conquest, killing his first victim to make her a vampire as well, Good Stab’s violence is aimed primarily at men, first at the white men who are destroying his people and their way of life, and then later at anyone who can sate his thirst and keep him alive. His desire for vengeance ends up destroying his inner self, which might be a soul in another context.

The novel is extremely violent, to a level that makes Cormac McCarthy’s violence seem mundane. Blood is, of course, a core part of the plot, and the most obvious symbol in the book, but the ways in which Cat Man and Ghost Stab kill beyond just getting the blood they need to heal and survive are gorey and often stomach-churning. I understand that some of this is just Jones’ representations of the depredations of genocide; I’m sure the colonizers did these things and worse to the natives they abused and murdered. It doesn’t make it an easier read, especially when Jones lingers on some of the more violent deaths.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is also heavy with metaphor, starting with the blood itself, a symbol of life and the importance of family, clan, and tribe. Good Stab drains his victims of blood, leaving them empty, lifeless shells, not dissimilar to how the colonizers leave the ancestral lands of the people they wipe out – people for whom blood ties hold stronger meaning. Skins, and taking the skins of animals and later people as ‘robes,’ appear as a metaphor for race and the artificial distinctions between people, even people who should ostensibly be on the same side. It’s a novel replete with the kinds of literary techniques that will make it fodder for academic papers for years.

I’ve largely avoided giving anything like an opinion so far on The Buffalo Hunter Hunter¸ because I am of two minds on the book. It is a powerful fable, a searing indictment, a retelling of a shameful moment in the history of the United States. It’s also violent as hell, to the point of distracting from what I interpreted as its aims, and Good Stab’s remaining humanity is often hard to see through the blood, making him a less compelling character than he might have been had he been more discerning in his choices of victims. The chapter where he and Cat Man have their ultimate fight goes on too long, while the final conversation between Good Stab and Arthur is probably too short. I recommend it, with qualifications. It is a strong work of contemporary and indigenous literature, and it’s also very hard to stomach in many parts. Your tolerance may be quite different from mine.

Next up: Percival Everett’s God’s Country.