The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
A Novel
Stephen Graham Jones, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana, is one of the most prolific, award-winning, and admired horror writers working today. While I haven’t read everything he’s written, I devoured The Only Good Indians, all three installments of the Indian Lake Trilogy, and I Was a Teenage Slasher. His talent for writing inventive mainstream horror with disaffected, misunderstood teenage heroes is salve to my Gen X childhood wounds. Jade Daniels, the heroine or “final girl” of his Indian Lake Trilogy, is an Indigenous girl, and that historical, generational trauma bears on the narrative—but she’s also an instantly recognizable iteration of the underdog characters I tend to admire. Jade is an outsider, a lonely rebel, a lovable loser who somehow survives on her own wits, strength, and spirit.
So when I heard Jones was working on a vampire novel about a Lutheran pastor, my horror-loving heart skipped a beat at the convergence of my special interests as a religion nerd and SGJ fangirl. But The Buffalo Hunter Hunter upended my expectations. This is the only Jones book I had to read twice—not for pleasure, but because I realized that I hadn’t quite understood it the first time.
Jones and I were born a few years apart and share a reverence for the horror fiction and movies and the heavy metal of the 1970s and ’80s, and I had grown accustomed to his rock and roll style. But there are no Mötley Crüe references in this book, and after puzzling over the first hundred pages, reading and rereading sentences and entire paragraphs and coming away with only a vague sense of what was happening, I realized I was out of my depth. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a vampire novel, but it is also much more, and my ignorance of the history and language of Blackfeet culture and the real history of the American West made it almost incomprehensible to me on my first pass. By the time I finished, I wondered if this was intended. So I did something I almost never do and immediately started the book again, this time doing a lot more Googling as I read.
