The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
1. Unless I’m mistaken, this was my first horror novel. That is, not counting Frankenstein.
2. Stephen Graham Jones is the author, and for contemporary fans of elevated genre or horror fiction, he needs no introduction. But I’m neither of those things, so this was my introduction to him—and what a first meeting it was. On the back of one of his other novels Jones’s bio calls him “the Jordan Peele of horror literature.” That sounds right to me.
3. I was prepared for the ideas, the what-if scenario, and the social commentary. I wasn’t prepared for the total control of tone, voice, and prose style. Jones sells books, but he isn’t dumbing down his language to do it. It took me fifty, maybe a hundred pages before I fully settled into the rhythm of his style. He likes long sentences. He doesn’t mind grammatical constructions that trip you up or make you retrace your steps. He’s willing to make you work. And he makes good on his side of the bargain, because the work is worth it.
4. The conceit of the novel is this: In 2012 a century-old diary is found. Writing in 1912 in Montana, a Lutheran pastor recounts a series of encounters in which he takes the “confession” of a man who, he and we learn, was born some eighty years prior and claims to be an undying vampire. (Not a term either of them uses, to be clear.) The pastor’s name is Arthur Beaucarne, a Yale graduate of German extraction; the vampire’s name is Good Stab—also The Fullblood, also Takes No Scalps—a member of the Small Robe tribe of Blackfeet Indians. The “wrapper” of the narrative is Etsy, a thirtysomething middling academic hoping for tenure and also the great-great-great-granddaughter of Arthur. She is transcribing the diary. The diary itself contains both Arthur’s personal reflections, in his own voice, and the transcribed first-person testimony of Good Stab, whose story from the 1850s through the 1890s is the heart of the novel. But this testimony is mediated, and eventually we learn why he has chosen Arthur to take down his “confession.” A full 347 of the novel’s 424 pages consist of a back-and-forth, to-and-fro because pastor and vampire. Their relationship, and the intertwining of their lives, is the story.
5. You’ll already have noticed major parallels with Mary Shelley’s classic, in which a captain comes across a dying man with a story to tell about his past encounters with a monster bent on vengeance, followed by that monster’s own telling. These amount to competing testimonies of a shared history, raising questions about each narrator’s reliability. Both novels are defined by the fundamentally binary or dialogical structure of two characters facing each other as companions, counterparts, enemies, or all of the above. As also by the nineteenth century context, framed as the dawn of an age of industry, enlightenment, and science, even as that age is haunted by the presence of Christ, the Christian religion, and the legacy of Europe, which cast a shadow over all of it.
6. The twist being that here, the vampire or “Nachzehrer” with his “dark gospel,” is a Native American. (Jones is himself Blackfeet. In fact, he was born in Midland, two hours west of where I write these words, and teaches English at the University of Colorado Boulder.) The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is about the American frontier, westward expansion, and the crimes committed against Indian peoples. Good Stab’s bloodlust, immortality, and campaign of violence against settlers and hunters and soldiers is a kind of alternative history of the west—albeit, unlike the florid alt-histories of a filmmaker like Tarantino, the victims still lose. In Good Stab’s case, revenge becomes personal. The scope is restricted to a single enemy. But the scale of what he inflicts is incalculable. Indeed, the nature of the punishment is infinite, which as he sees it corresponds to the nature of his loss. Unlike Arthur in his sermons, Good Stab does not believe in the remission of sins. Penance is a fantasy. That, in the end, is what makes this a horror story: not the serial bloodshed or the brutality of the violence, but the portrait of a world whose history, micro and macro both, is irredeemable, because neither repentance nor absolution is possible. Forgiveness is unthinkable as long as Good Stab is unkillable, which is to say, as long as his tribe remains in the grave. Jones wouldn’t put it like this, but in his narrative imagination of the west, forgiveness and resurrection are inseparable. One cannot happen without the other. And if there is no hope for the latter, neither is there hope for the former.
7. Jones has good fun with vampire mythology, spinning off his own rules from the core template. Good Stab can survive in sunlight, but it’s painful, and he has to protect his eyes. So far as we ever learn, a bite doesn’t make someone else a vampire; it just kills them. Nothing can finally kill a vampire, only (for longer or shorter periods of time) incapacitate him. Most important of all, what one feeds on one slowly becomes—eucharistic parody alert—and that means quite anything with living blood. Feed on fish for years, you become ever fishier; feed on dogs for years, you slowly morph into a dog. The same holds for “kinds” of humans: Good Stab learns to his shame that feeding on white men changes his skin and eye color and gives him a beard. These rules are central to the novel in ways expected and unexpected. The most significant upshot is that, for Good Stab to remain Indian, he has to feed on his own people. This is the tragedy at the novel’s heart, one that keeps Good Stab from being a simplistic “hero” to Arthur’s, or the white man’s, “villain.”
8. Jones draws a portrait of both men with sympathy and full humanity. Each is weighed down by guilt, and each is trying to do something about it. Neither is released from it even by the final page.
9. Besides his command of voice—three different narrators are telling the “same” story, but their styles are utterly distinct from one another—Jones’s great virtue as a storyteller is patience. He’s never in a rush. You never quite know where Good Stab’s story is going. But he never bores you, either. The attention to detail is painstaking and always gripping.
10. I’ve not read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, much less any other horror fiction, but two further comparisons came to mind. One is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, with which the novel has much in common: the explicit consideration and rejection of the Christian religion as a false offer of transcendence, a poisoned gift forever associated with European and white American injustice and treachery, as well an ambivalent view of vampyrism as both a curse and a blessing—an unchosen and insatiable hunger for blood that nevertheless becomes a kind of weapon of the powerless against the powerful: a Faustian bargain for life without end in a culture of enmity and death.
11. Which raises the question: Who is going to adapt The Buffalo Hunter Hunter for the screen?
12. The other comparison comes from a blurb on the front cover: “Horror’s Moby-Dick.” That was probably just some reviewer’s nice way of honoring Jones’s epic, but the great American novel is obviously in the background here. The final wintery scene in Jones pays homage to Melville’s closing watery image. Both are stories gripped and driven by the spirit of revenge, only here Good Stab is Ahab and the reader doesn’t learn until very late whether Arthur is Ishmael or Moby-Dick. There is even a very important aquatic interlude that inverts the power of Leviathan compared to that of the Fullblood. Many more threads are worth chasing down here.
13. This, then, makes me want to teach a course that runs from Moby-Dick through Blood Meridian to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, with possible detours into Cather, Ellison, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Morrison, and—if you’ll hear me out—John Kennedy Toole. Some of those authors remain aspirational for me. But man, throwing East of Eden into the mix makes a lot of sense.
14. There are only a few flaws worth mentioning. Jones admits in his acknowledgements that while he did some research into Lutheranism, he did not run the manuscript by any actual living Lutherans (or theologians), and it shows here and there. Alas. There are also exactly two false notes in the entire book, when Jones the novelist stands up and makes the subtext text, shouting the book’s theme at the reader. Good Stab on page 163: “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.” And Arthur on page 302: “This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead mutely witnessing.” Yikes! We get it, man. You don’t have to tell us. It’s plain as day and, otherwise, artfully told. Message received.
15. But these are minor. The only real flaw in the book is Etsy. Two men dominate the novel and they are fully realized, fascinating, compelling characters. By contrast, Etsy is one-dimensional, uninteresting, and (more than once) unbelievable. She adds next to nothing, except perhaps incredulity and exasperation in the reader. I don’t know why she had to be a whining, lonely, self-pitying, very-online failing academic. Compared to a vampire’s despair for a lost world and a pastor’s theological ruminations on gluttony and pardon, she comes up short. Oh well.
16. I’ve left out much, not least Good Stab’s nickname for Arthur (“Three-Persons,” named either for the Christian God or for the personas Arthur has indwelled or assumed across his life), and perhaps most of all the sheer texture and weight of Good Stab’s story. The novel concludes with a degree of despair I wasn’t prepared for. I still can’t decide whether Jones is himself this close to nihilism in his view of history as sheer godforsaken tragedy or whether he is simply being faithful to the heart of his great creation, Good Stab. Either way, the story was worth it. And it made for quite a follow-up to Ingrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, another religious novel about the (im)possibility of penance, albeit with a different answer than Jones’s. Read both and see which you find the more persuasive.
