→ August 12, 2026
→ By
→ 1 Comment

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 18, 2026
→ By

Flashlight.

A ten-year-old girl, Louisa, is walking on some rocks on a beach with her father at night, using a flashlight to light their way. The next thing she knows, she wakes up feeling half-drowned on the beach, and her father has vanished. It will be decades before she and her mother Anne get the whole truth.

Susan Choi, who won the National Book Award for her 2019 novel Trust Exercise, once again plays with narrative structure and unreliable narration in Flashlight*, a longer and more ambitious novel that leans heavily on a stranger-than-fiction slice of history to illuminate (pun intended) the four very eccentric characters within the story. It’s unfortunate, however, that they are all so unlikeable, making so much of this 500-page book a chore to read despite the smart prose and sensible pacing.

* Da da da dee, da da da, da da da da.

Saying too much about the plot risks spoiling the big twist, although I have to say I saw it coming almost from the start. (I’ve said before that I am not a reader who typically sees twists coming or successfully figures out the culprits in books; in this case, I was helped by a couple of clues and the fact that I know the real-world story that Choi used as her basis.) What I can say is that the story then moves back to how Anne and Louisa’s father, variously known as Serk or Seok, each grew up, including Anne giving birth to a son, Tobias, who goes to live with his father. The plot passes quickly to Louisa’s birth, her early years, and then to life after Serk’s presumed death by drowning, which happens as Anne is experiencing neurological symptoms that I think any reader will recognize as early signs of multiple sclerosis. Louisa becomes a very difficult and cruel teenager who can’t wait to escape to college and shuts her mother out for most of her life, while Anne’s life is largely filled with tragedy and disappointment. Tobias, meanwhile, pops back up a few times, eventually settling in as an itinerant samaritan who takes a particular interest in being a kind big brother to Louisa, when he’s not wandering the world or hanging out in Buddhist temples.

The plot twist is really secondary to the four character studies that constitute Flashlight, so if you do figure it out, it likely won’t materially alter your experience reading it. I did find some of the resolution to be exhausting to read, not because of the details, which are true to life, but because it was such a tonal departure from everything that came before – well, except that there’s more suffering, there is a lot of suffering in this book – at a point where a reader might expect the plot’s movement to accelerate towards the ending. Choi does craft indelible characters, even if at least two of them in this book kind of suck, and none of the four generated the empathy I’d expect to feel for at least one protagonist in any serious novel. Tobias is a wisp of a person, but the other three are well-rounded and hard to forget – and, even when they didn’t deserve it, I was still rooting for any of them to get something like a satisfying ending.

I couldn’t get there with Flashlight, even though it is well-written and well-crafted. I couldn’t avoid comparing it to one of the books she cites in her acknowledgements as an inspiration, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, which is a better plotted work, one that mixes its suffering with dark humor, and takes the reader to more interesting places. It may be an unfair comparison – there are only so many American novels that touch on North Korea, and only so many ways to get into the topic – but ultimately Flashlight came out on the losing end.

Next up: C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ February 13, 2026
→ By

Flesh.

David Szalay’s Flesh is an alienated novel about alienation: It keeps the reader at arm’s length from its main character, István, a young Hungarian man with no apparent morality or values who acts on impulse for most of his life. The spartan prose, especially the dialogue, helps create an atmosphere of futility and disaffection, reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, but doesn’t ask any questions of itself, neither its protagonist or its world, to explain his feelings or his actions in a meaningful way. It won the 2025 Booker Prize, beating out books by previous winner Kiran Desai as well as Susan Choi.

When we meet István, he’s a 15-year-old living in a public housing project in Hungary who, after a friend tries to get him to lose his virginity with another girl they know, ends up groomed into a ‘relationship’ by an adult woman neighbor – although this is just statutory rape. This ends in violence that leads to István serving time in juvenile detention and then as a soldier in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which further hardens him; while there, he saw one of his close friends killed by an IED, later receiving an honor for his own efforts in the same incident. Upon his discharge, he moves to London, works in private security, and ends up in a relationship with the wife of his wealthy boss, leading to an elevation in his social status that he can’t match with any change in his attitudes, language, or ultimately his behavior.

Life largely happens to István; he perseveres but has almost no initiative, and the most active thing he does – the crime that gets him sent to prison early in the book – is an accident. He almost fails upwards, going from someone who doesn’t even know what sex is when the novel opens to someone who falls backwards into it by the time his boss’s wife seduces him. The pervasive anomie throughout the novel provides some context, although Szalay seems to be telling us that the world is making men like István – the incel argument, although he is certainly not celibate – rather than making István responsible for at least some of his own actions. He’s born poor, with fewer choices than someone born into more privilege, but he doesn’t lack agency entirely.

Much of the praise for Flesh has been for its ascetic prose, which does make the book a very quick read, while also preventing it from becoming leaden with its aimless protagonist and depressing plot. The sparseness is primarily in the dialogue; István is a man of few words, but none of the characters is especially garrulous. Szalay also creates paragraphs of a single sentence – “The news is disorienting,” “It’s already getting dark” – that make the book a faster read, but also don’t imprint anything on the mind. The words rolled off me, even when I sort of found some meaning in the story.

Flesh is built on a foundation of toxic masculinity. Is it, however, an indictment of toxic masculinity itself, or of the so-called masculinity crisis, which is (in my opinion) largely manufactured by, well, men. Szalay presents István as a man with limited options, not with no options. He seems to be making the case that society as a whole has lost its centers that provided young men with direction or purpose. Religion is dying. Traditional male job paths have declined. The man as head-of-household is no longer the dominant family paradigm. István goes into the military, which might be the one traditionally male or masculine field that’s at least similar to what it was fifty years ago, and it’s the only major event in István’s life that provides him with structure and meaning – and it’s accompanied by trauma. One of the Booker Prize judges said that István is “struggling to gain control of his life.” I could buy that if I saw any of the struggle.

Next up: About halfway through Petersburg by Andrei Bely, who for some reason is listed as “Deceased Andrei Bely” on Bookshop.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,