→ August 12, 2026
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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.

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→ March 25, 2020
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Sabrina & Corina.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is her first published volume, a slim collection of eleven stories about women of mixed Latina and indigenous ancestry grappling with identity, sexism, and cultural changes in the rapidly shifting landscape of Denver, the author’s hometown. The book was shortlisted for the National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Story Prize (won by Everything Inside) and made numerous year-end top ten lists for 2019, due, I assume, to its beautiful prose and the window it opens on to characters and subcultures that do not often appear in contemporary literary fiction.

The title story is told through the eyes of Corina, remembering her cousin Sabrina with whom she shared much of her childhood before they grew apart as Sabrina became more licentious, and who has now been strangled by some unknown man months after the last time Corina saw her, the latest in a long string of women in her family killed or harmed by men. That leads into “Sisters,” which jumps back a few decades to tell how Corina’s aunt was blinded by a violent man – and how little people even seemed to care about what happened to her. “Tomi,” one of the standout stories in the collection, is told by a woman who’s just coming home from prison to live with her brother and his son, the title character, as she tries to rebuild trust with her family even as Tomi is struggling with his mom leaving the family, leading to a confrontation when Tomi tries to go see his mother across town. Every story has some incident of death or another kind of loss, set against the backdrop of a city that marginalizes women of color in multiple ways – economically, geographically, socially – and creates the conditions for these cycles to repeat themselves.

I wouldn’t put this among the top contenders for this year’s literary awards – at this point, the Pulitzer is really the only significant one left – because there just isn’t enough here. The stories are great, without a letdown in the collection, but there is a sameness across the volume that made me want Fajardo-Anstine to stretch out beyond these themes and character archetypes. I assume she will do so as she grows as a writer, whether in more short stories or in longer forms of fiction, but by the time I reached the final story, the plaintive “Ghost Sickness,” I realized how similar the characters and settings had become over the course of the book. There’s a tenuous quality to the stories, especially their main characters, where I felt connected to what was happening but not to the women at the centers of these events, and in nine or ten of the stories the protagonist might as well have been the same person. It is a very promising debut effort, however, a bit like a rookie season by someone you think is going to become a star in another year or two – just not as well-developed a work as you’d expect of someone further in their career.

—

I’d set a goal for myself for 2019 to read ten works of literary fiction, and this marked the tenth such work I’ve read, which means I feel like I have read enough to rank them. This isn’t a Pulitzer prediction in any way, but a matter of personal preference. I wouldn’t be shocked to see something from this list win the award for fiction next month, though.

1. Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
2. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
3. Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg
4. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
5. Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
6. Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
7. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
9. Exhalation by Ted Chiang
10. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

The one 2019 work of fiction I haven’t read but plan to read when I can is Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. If something I haven’t read wins the Pulitzer, I’ll read that too.

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→ February 9, 2019
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There There.

Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There draws its title from multiple sources, including the great Radiohead song of that name and the oft-used but misunderstood Gertrude Stein quote about Oakland, which might give you some idea of how hazy and broad the novel is as a whole. With twelve central characters in a novel of a scant 290 pages – including a lot of white space – there are interesting ideas but, for readers who like to connect with characters in novels they read, not much there here.

Orange is Native American, a enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma (I was ignorant of this idea of enrollment before this) and the idea of being Native American in our current society, which simultaneously fetishizes aspects of indigenous cultures while putting substantial pressure on people of Native descent to assimilate. The twelve characters in There There are connected by a complex web of biological relationships and coincidental acquaintances, all of which leads them to a major pow-wow at whatever it is we’re calling the Oakland A’s stadium right now. Several of the characters plan to rob the powwow using 3D printed guns made by yet another character, which, of course, leads to a mass shooting event that closes out the book. (That’s a spoiler, but if you don’t see that coming by everything that comes before, we may need to talk about foreshadowing.)

The characters themselves don’t get enough page time to develop any depth or to distinguish themselves from each other – it’s not always this simple, but 14-15 pages per character doesn’t give the author much time to develop them – so I had a particularly hard time keeping their relationships straight. That’s exacerbated by what I assume was a major point of Orange’s – that the fractured nature of Native Americans living in a sort of parallel or shadow world next to ours can lead to fractured family relationships. Nobody in this novel has or grew up in a nuclear two-parent home where all members were biologically related, and many were raised by someone other than a parent. In that sense, the lack of definition around the characters works in the novel’s favor, because every individual seems just a little out of focus – and from the way many of them describe their upbringings, that may also represent how they feel.

There are other elements of Native culture present in the book that didn’t make sense to me in context, although I could simply have failed to understand them because I know so little about Native traditions. Several characters report pulling spiders’ legs out of their own legs – they’ll have a wound or cyst of some sort, and then will pull strands out of them that resemble spiders’ legs. It’s the only bit of magical realism in the novel – assuming that’s what it is – and it’s never explained, eventually just disappearing without explanation. If that’s a symbol, I missed it, and yet felt like there was something significant about the descriptions that I needed to grasp to fully understand the book.

And then there’s the mass shooting, which, unfortunately, is way too familiar in contemporary fiction, which is of course an artifact of how familiar mass shootings are in American life today. The way the shooting plays out makes it feel like a jumble of knots Orange used to tie off all of the loose threads he’d created over the course of the novel, and avoids the trap of having to give each of these characters individual endings. The failure to develop any of the characters also makes the ending – some are shot, at least one dies, some do heroic things – surprisingly inert for what should be an evocative portrayal of a gigantic trauma. You should feel something when a significant named character dies on the page; I was still trying to sort out who was who, leaving me disconnected from everything that happened to them.

I heard of There There from a site that tries to predict each year’s Pulitzer winner so that collectors can try to get first editions; this was currently their most likely title to win, although I don’t believe they had last year’s winner, Less, on their board at all. (They nailed the previous year’s winner, The Underground Railroad.) Perhaps they’re right – it has been positively reviewed, and stories about Native Americans in modern America would fit the Pulitzer’s guidelines favoring stories about the American experience. It just didn’t click with me in the least.

Next up: Already more than halfway through the Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson.

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→ October 20, 2015
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House Made of Dawn.

N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, making him (I believe) the first Native American author to win the award. Momaday, a Kiowa member who was already at that time on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, is now credited by critics and other Native American authors with spawning a renaissance in literature by Native Americans, even though reviews at the time were somewhat mixed because of the inherently foggy nature of most of the narrative in the book. I’m inclined toward the latter, but with the recognition that there is something in the experiences described in House Made of Dawn that are so utterly foreign to me as a white American of entirely European descent that the fog will not apply equally to all readers.

The subject of Momaday’s first novel is named Abel, a young Native American adult who grew up on the reservation but was drafted and served in Vietnam, only to run into the common difficulties experienced by soldiers returning from that conflict. He returns to the reservation in New Mexico, yet, scarred by the conflict and returning with a drinking problem, he’s unable to resume his previous life and ends up stabbing a man he claims is a witch to death. After serving a term in prison, he’s paroled to Los Angeles, where he finds himself unable to assimilate into society, drinking to excess, losing any job he gets, sabotaging his only relationships, and eventually returning to the reservation after nearly dying from his own inability to manage his rage.

Part of the difficulty contemporary reviews had with House Made of Dawn was the hazy way Momaday narrates three of the novel’s four main sections, telling mundane stories of Abel’s life in the manner of myths passed down via oral traditions, speaking in metaphors or losing himself (and the reader) in lengthy descriptions of natural elements of the scenes. I found it hard to follow the narratives in the first two sections, and I can’t tell you whether it was the ambiguous writing of the active elements or the fact that I got so bored with the Dickensian details of the environment. This style of writing may draw on a literary history with which I’m unfamiliar, but I found it worse than distracting and actually offputting.

I have no Native American blood and close to zero knowledge of the cultures of the various tribes that exist or have existed within the borders of the current United States, so I was at an insurmountable cultural disadvantage in trying to read and understand House Made of Dawn. That said, I’m a white guy who enjoys much African-American literature that engages in similar techniques of metaphorical writing and magical realism, works that draw on experiences I haven’t had and probably can never fully grasp. Those authors, the Toni Morrisons and the Alice Walkers and the Zora Neale Thurstons and so on, manage to translate those experiences in ways that readers without them can appreciate, even if we can’t connect with them on the same fundamental level. That to me is Momaday’s failure here: I could barely tell what Abel was doing, and I never had the chance to relate to the emotional side of his character. We know he came back from the war a damaged person, but never get the details of why; suddenly he’s knifed a guy for no apparent reason other than that he was drunk. I know there’s more to it than that, but it wasn’t on the pages and that prevented me from getting anything close to what the Pulitzer committee must have seen in the book.

Next review: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.

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