Each book of SGJ I read I love more. This one is one of the more unique ones.
Going into it you find out it’s about a journal from a Lutheran pastor who took confessions from a native vampire. It has the ring of Interview with the Vampire to it, but there’s so much more!
The twists and turns, the connection to the events of the time ( Buffalo being massacred), the heart and feeling you have for Good Stab as he’s losing then finding himself again.

SGJ is an auto-read author for me, and I knew I would enjoy this one.

It is a bit different from previous books of his in terms of writing style (imo) and the historical bits, but similar in that he does a fantastic job at weaving the indigenous experience into his narratives--and scaring the pants off his readers.

This was as engrossing as it was horrifying. Stephen simply does not miss.

I love how seamlessly the author is able to weave together history with fiction. You still get to enjoy the supernatural horror, while also learning along the way. It really is a skill to be able to write historical fiction well enough that your readers forget that it’s based on real events. And who doesn’t like vampires?

This book was pretty brutal though with a lot of death and a lot of gruesome descriptions. This probably is not the book for you if you get squeamish with injury details. If you enjoy that sort of thing, then this book will be a dream!

The writing was beautifully done and I felt that the story flowed really well. The only qualm I had with this book was that at times it was a bit confusing to me. There were some things that I didn’t know the meanings of at first and I at times struggled with keeping characters straight. It just took some adjustment and highlights to reference back to.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc of this book!

TW: violence, murder, gore, death, animal death, racism, rape, torture, blood, fire injury, colonization, body horror, child death, injury detail

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐵𝑢𝑓𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑜 𝐻𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝐻𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟 by Stephen Graham Jones is is an addictive read. It's an epistolary tale in an epistolary tale—a descendant learning a horrible truth about her ancestor—recorded in three forms. Besides a bit of false suspense at the end, I had only the niggle that "right he" and "like this" were used in the journal entries, without an accompanying description--like a movie transcript.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a roller coaster of a ride. The description alone had me hooked from the first chapter. When a journal is found in the wall of a Lutheran church. The journal is from 1912 and details the story told by a young Blackfeet Indian and a vampire, Good Stab as he retells the events of his life and why he is making his confession to the paster. This is a page turner that has all the gore factor that Stephen Graham Jones is known for. Any fan of horror will love reading Buffalo Hunter Hunter. I would like to thank both NetGalley and S&S/Saga Press for letting me read an advanced copy of this book.

The book…Horror! Horrific! Horrifying! Grisly! Bloodcurdling! Brutal! The writing…Brilliant! Earth-moving! Shattering! With one exception. I kept getting lost trying to figure out the translation of animals from the Pikuni language. I wish there were a glossary so that I could continue reading without stopping to solve the puzzle. Put that aside and read this uncanny take on a vampire taking revenge during a brutal and unforgivable time in our history.

A woman is notified of her great-great grandfather’s diary recently found at a construction site. She has to decide its fate. The story unfolds as she read the diary entries of her ancestor, a Lutheran pastor. He details the confessions of an Indian named Good Stab during the reign of terror on Native American tribes and their food source, the buffaloes. The massacres and bloodshed both real (history) and imagined (fiction) leave no room for interpretation.

The vampire seeks revenge from those who decimated his people, stole land and killed the buffalo. At the same time he needs to retain his culture while struggling with the inhumanity of it all.

Thank you NetGalley and Saga Press for this ARC.

Stephen Graham Jones is such an impressive author. He’s able to switch between different types of horror, characters, plots, and writing styles so seamlessly. In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter he presents a vampire story unlike anything I’ve ever read before. A diary from 1912 is discovered that details a Lutheran pastor’s encounters with a Blackfeet man named Good Stab. A man who claims to be much older than he appears and subsists only on blood…

I really liked how the book switched back and forth between being in the pastor’s voice and in Good Stab’s voice. It helped to make their character so distinct. And it also helped to show the ways that Arthur, the pastor, was changing throughout the book and being influenced by Good Stab’s story. The narrative that Good Stab tells is full of anger, revenge, massacres, and the true history of the ways that indigenous people were treated in this country.

It was so interesting to see how Stephen Graham Jones crafted his vampires. He gave them some elements that I personally haven’t seen before in other stories. So it made this book feel completely unique. There is a frame narrative of a relative of the pastor in 2012 discovering his diary and learning about this history. But I didn’t find that portion of the book as compelling as what had been happening in the past.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. It had complex characters, suspense, revenge, reveals, and provided historical information without ever feeling like a dry history lesson. Definitely check this one out if you’re looking for a different type of horror novel or representation of vampires.

A Vampire, a Massacre, and a Confession You’ll Never Forget

Stephen Graham Jones has done it again, delivering a gut-punching masterpiece that leaves you breathless and questioning the very soil beneath your feet. Why, Stephen? WHY? This isn’t just a novel, it’s a haunting séance of blood, betrayal, and unrelenting grief. From a 1912 pastor’s dusty diary to the chilling voice of Good Stab, this is the untold story of Blackfeet justice and the creeping shadows of the American West. And Weasel Plume? Don’t even get me started. If you’re not weeping, are you even human? Or... vampire?

Read it. Or you’ll regret missing one of the most visceral, unforgettable stories you’ll ever encounter.

This was a let down for me, I've never read a SGJ novel and was hoping to get into his work with this story. The problem for me was the prose and pacing of this story, I only made it to 20% before giving up. The book is written from several perspectives starting with a women from the current era reading a journal from the 1800's. The journal entries are from her great great grandfather who is recalling confessions from a Native American from earlier in his life. This is where most of the story comes from, the recounts from her relative writing from the concessioner's perspective. He writings the journal entries as the Native American man would have been speaking, which is done well, but that was where my problem was at. The prose is slow and disjointed and makes for a boring story in my opinion. When something kind of interesting started to happen I kept reading along waiting for the energy to capture me and draw me in, but it just never happened, it never grabbed me and made me want to keep reading. My TBR list is far too long to spend too much time and energy on some writing that isn't grabbing me and making me want to continue reading. This might not be a problem for some readers and this is fine, but for me this is a pass.

Stephen Graham Jones can’t help himself, he just keeps writing slashers.

I know, I know, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a vampire western, sure, and yes, it is that. A Lutheran Preacher is visited each Sunday by a strange Indian who wishes to make his “confession,” and the story he tells is a supernatural revenge tale full of violence, body horror, and endless, endless grief. Good Stab, as we come to know him, describes a run-in with an inhuman creature in the Montana mountains, somewhere around 1870. He survives this altercation, but is bit, and soon his body begins to go through terrifying changes, most notably, an insatiable craving for blood.

This familiar vampire origin story (bearing a great deal of familiar werewolf tropes to boot) quickly transforms into something much less familiar. Graham Jones quickly reinvents the vampire while still honoring its Eastern European roots. In fact, one might say that vampirism is just one more plague brought by colonial expansion (but you’ll have to read to see just how and why).

Good Stab sees his new nature as a curse, and there’s little new about that, but it’s a double curse for him because it separates him from every form of tradition and fellowship. To be a monster is to be cut off from your people, from your stories, from the very animals. He lives like a beast for some time, purposeless and grieving.

And then the massacres happen. At the Center of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is the horrific Marias Massacre, in which some two-hundred Blackfeet (mostly women and children) were slaughtered by U.S. forces. The reverberations of this event are felt through every page. The second massacre is that of the Buffalo themselves, hunted for their robes and left not only rotting in the sun but laced with poison, making the meat unusable to native people and poisoning the wolf population.

Good Stab recognizes these events for what they are: the end of the world. He is watching a genocide play out before his eyes, and he chooses to use his supernatural powers to wreak revenge.

Which isn’t to say that Good Stab is a “good vampire.” He is driven by an unstoppable hunger, and the details of Graham Jones’ vampire cosmology leads our hero to feed most often on his own people, an event that is heartbreaking and damning each time it happens. Because no matter what he does, Good Stab is caught up in the vast machinery of colonialism, and no one gets out unscathed.

So, what about my initial claim that The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is, in essence, a slasher? It ticks all the boxes: an unstoppable, unkillable killer who murders the guilty and innocent alike; a traumatic event that spurs the slasher’s vengeance; even a Michael Meyers-esque penchant for staging his kills like a director setting the stage. Add in the fact that in I Was a Teenage Slasher (Graham Jones’ other attempt at showing us the world through the slasher’s eyes) we’re treated to the conceit that slasherdom is itself a blood-borne curse, and there’s a perfect through-line.

But while Teenage Slasher was a fun romp that culminated in a poignant conclusion, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter will pull out your heart and stomp on it. It also happens to be Graham Jones’ greatest accomplishment thus far: a novel of incredible scope and emotional resonance that works its allegory so seamlessly into the telling that it no longer resembles allegory. A horror story about the impossibility of redeeming our history, it is, in short, a masterpiece.

This was so damn good. Historical fiction and vampires, I had to pick this one up early.
It's devastating, heartbreaking, stressful, horrific, brutal, gruesome, funny... everything you expect from SGJ.

The page count on this says 448? It honestly didn't feel like it, but I would have read 600+ pages. Loved the storytelling, the back and forth timelines made this impossible to put down. This is in my top ten of 2024.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the e-arc!

The premise of a Native American vampire was fascinating. I was very invested in that characters perspective. Where it got tricky for me are the other point of views. It was kind of hard to read. There are different timelines as well, so I had a hard time keeping things cohesive in my head. This could be better as an audiobook with specific voices for each perspective and timeline.

This story was a breath of fresh air. A journal from 1912 is uncovered and tells the story of a vampire haunting the mountainous plains of Montana during the American Frontier. I have always seen vampire stories from the point of view of a European. To view a vampire’s world through a Native American perspective was unique and intriguing. It really amplified the monstrosity of vampires to the natural world. There was no forgiveness, just full on rage. Stephen has outdone himself with this one.

Thank you, thank you, thank you netgalley and S&S for this incredible eARC!

Almost Nabokovian in style, the story within a story within a story of Good Stab, the nachzehner (vampire) who takes revenge on those who massacred the buffalo and starved his people defys classification. Graham Jones continues to write epic horror with literary aploumb, and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a masterclass. Etsy Beaucarne is altered when a diary purporting to be from her ancestor is found in the walls of an old house. Trying to earn her place in academia, Etsy begins to transcribe the story told by a priest who shares her name, who tells the story of a man who is known by many names and feared by one - Takes No Scalps. If you weren't already drawn in by the idea of a Native vampire bent on revenge, I can't help you, but if you give this a read your mind will be blown.

I'm crying and I don't even know why? This was so good. Not just the vampire part, which was so different and interesting, but just the whole story was tragic and bloody and slow and just reached in and grabbed me. At times humourous ("house of ill repute" cat is my fav) and at times violent and bloody (that church scene though), and I don't know how SGJ can write horror that both haunts you and makes you cry but he's so good at it. I will be thinking about this for a long time and processing for a long time (I need to go sit and stare at a wall until I can function again).

If you picked this up or considering picking this up because you think "ooo vampires, fun!" Stop. This is not what you think. This is wild and some scenes will forever haunt me. If you have read a SGJ book before then you have an idea of what to expect. If not, please look up trigger warnings.

Inititially, I was so conflicted reading this. I just couldn't establish if I liked it or not. There were terms I didn't understand and at times it was a bit repetative. All that aside, I couldn't put it down. This is a very dense slow burn so I did my best to stick with it and boy was I not disappointed. SGJ has completely outdone himself. The writing, characters, twists and turns in this were top notch and while I can't say this was a particularly enjoyable read, it is one of SGJs best.

A solid story and original plot but felt like something was definitely missing. The prose was well written but needed to be more efficient in terms of pacing. 3 stars

If I could give this book six thousand stars, I would. I stand by the fact that Stephen Graham Jones is nothing short of a literary genius. The way he utilizes the horror genre to shine light on dark topics of history and human nature (as well as inhuman nature) is truly a treat to read. I had to take this one a few chapters at a time because of the amount of gore but it paid off in the end and I was hooked on every single word. I cannot wait until this is published so I can get my hands on a physical copy and annotate the hell out of it!

This narrative is an absolute nightmare in the most compelling way. It offers a distinctive and engaging take on a vampire story while encompassing much more. The storytelling is intelligent, deliberate, and decidedly unsettling.

This book was a thoroughly engaging dive into vampire lore. Indigenous history mixed with supernatural horror is not a combination I would have expected, but it made for an amazing story.