An Indigenous vampire wreaks bloody vengeance in Stephen Graham Jones new horror western tale.
” What I am is the Indian who cannot die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.” A quote from Good Stab, the main protagonist in Stephen Graham Jones’ new horror novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. This statement reinforces the United States attitude toward Indigenous People. Indians were America’s first boogeyman. Monsters that needed to be exterminated to make the country safe for European settlers, who used religion to justify their acts of genocide. The tables are flipped as Good Stab is a Blackfeet hunter turned vampire, who goes on a violent rampage of bloody revenge.
Told in a series of journal entries, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a vampire western tale of an Indigenous blood sucker who confesses his tragic life to a church pastor in a Montana town during the early 1900s. Good Stab attends the Sunday services and narrates his quest of vengeance on the colonizers who massacred his tribe. Arthur Beaurcarne is the priest who documents his story in a diary that makes up the novel’s main narrative.
After being infected by a vampire, Good Stab spends his undead years slaying the soldiers and encroaching settlers who have invaded Blackfeet territory. He is particularly cruel to the buffalo hunters who are killing herds of bison just to collect their hides. Their swift slaughter deprived many Native tribes of their food source. Good Stab hunts these poachers down and butchers them in bloody splatter film fashion, hence the novel’s title. Driven by retribution as well as his bloodthirst, Good Stab begins to lose his humanity, becoming the monster this country has turned him into.
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Stephen Graham Jones meticulously crafts this western horror yarn with historical accuracy while mixing in terrifying gore in what may be his best novel yet. As much as the blood is plentiful, the story is also layered with heartbreaking sadness. The vampires are not attractive in this tale, as Good Stab is cursed with an eternal life of sorrow in the wake of America’s birth. A survivor of the Indigenous Apocalypse, a witness to the atrocities done to his people, and forced to live on with the horrific memories.
In a recent interview, Stephen Graham Jones stated that America’s best superpower is forgetting. This country has rewritten its history for centuries. Most notably the erasure of Indigenous People. Their culture and languages nearly lost, becoming sports teams and Halloween costumes. Their tribal names reduced to car brands and city streets. Half the states in America are named after mispronounced Indigenous words. Even horrific acts of violence are forgotten and dismissed, in favor of gloating flag waving nationalism.
The novel revolves around the Marias Massacre of 1870, where over 200 Blackfeet were killed by the U.S Calvary. This atrocity is directly tied to Good Stab. While all the vampire bloodsucking violence is just spooky horror fun, it is the real-life horror that grounds this story in a disturbing reality. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter makes it a point to be a reminder of the Holocaust done to the Indigenous People. Good Stab is just America’s violent past coming back to haunt them.
In his past novels, Stephen Graham Jones reinvented certain elements in horror. He deconstructed the slasher genre in My Heart Is A Chainsaw, and offered a new spin on werewolves in Mongrels. In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Jones reinvents the vampire myth, creating a less sexy version of these creatures of the night. This is not the attractive gothic cape wearing count dancing to Bauhaus that sells tons of Hot Topic merch.
Instead, Good Stab becomes a blood starved monster who takes on the attributes of whatever he feeds upon. In his feedings on the Non-Native hunters and soldiers, he starts to look less Indigenous. The story then takes another tragic turn, in order for Good Stab to remain Blackfeet, he must feed on his own people. Thus, contributing to the very genocide, he swore revenge on.
This brings up the theme of how vampirism equals colonization. Vampires are essentially a virus, biting and infecting a host. This idea is extended to American colonialism, as white settlers spread across this country like a plague, consuming resources causing the removal of the Indigenous population. When Good Stab is infected with the vampire virus, he begins to lose his own humanity as he becomes a bloodsucking parasite. He even loses his own Indigenous identity. His Blackfeet culture and lifeways forgotten as the beast within takes hold. That is the real tragedy, Good Stab is cursed to live as a walking virus committing self-assimilation.
With The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones has created a modern horror classic. A western revenge tale offering a new twist on vampire mythology. Good Stab is a well-crafted Indigenous character that can stand amongst the coolest vampires from classics like Dracula, Nosferatu, Near Dark or The Lost Boys. The novel is violent and gory, as well as disturbing and heartbreaking, confronting this country’s horrific violent past that is often ignored or dismissed. Forcing the reader to investigate the generational trauma that Indigenous People are still dealing with. Some of the best horror allows us to cope with real life horrors and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter does just that. An Indigenous vampire revenge fantasy that acts as a cathartic release which boldly states that; American history is a horror show.
