“What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had.”

This is my first Stephen Graham Jones book and I read it solely based on the synopsis. I had no expectations going in and I am SO glad I read this.

This book blends history and story telling in such a seamless way. I really enjoyed the time period jumps and narrator switches. Though I will say my favourite POV had to be Good Stab. The gut wrenching experience of the black feet as told through Good Stab were detailed and devastating. His struggle with the supernatural elements of this story, only more so amplifying everything.

“What he was talking about then was the hide-hunters I brought back with rope around their neck and kept in a low cave, and fed to keep alive, until I needed another one. It meant I could stay up in the Backbone longer. They were my whitehorns, penned up.”

“They're not even men" I said to him, about what I did.
"They're man enough," Napi said”

These passages really stuck me, because this is what the colonizers said about the Black Feet and all the Indigenous peoples. Taking from them and killing them without care because they saw them as less than human.

Stephen Graham Jones beautifully uses his horror story to retell the horrors suffered by so many.

SO MUCH VIOLENCE. Grotesque imagery and traumatic subject matter. Trigger warnings galore.

“but all the way up in the
Backbone he felt what you did,...”

Let me tell you it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this one out but when I did, oh boy. Good Stab AKA Takes No Scalps, you played the long game. Well played.

5 ⭐️

Thank you Simon & Schuster Canada, S&S/Saga Press and NetGalley for this advanced reader copy.

This was incredible. A new horror classic. Atmospheric and well written. I am staggered by how quickly SGJ can push work out without any dip in quality.

Jones entwines vampire myths with history and makes the familiar unfamiliar with a new portrayal of a well-known monster. Meanwhile, he shines a light on the monstrosity of American colonialism, the settlers who sucked the lifeblood from the land and the people who lived there through the over-extraction and wasteful destruction of natural resources and wildlife. There are various vampires in this story, and how they live and the violence they enact differs accordingly. This is a classic and frequently satisfying revenge narrative with many excellent turns. There are surprises in the plot, but also plenty of shocking images of gore and violence, as well as many moments of keen and disturbing tension. Darkly enjoyable and a fascinating historical horror novel.

If you look up VISCERAL in the dictionary…

This one is not an easy read and makes you feel all twisty inside.

The fiction of vampires is inextricably linked to the non-fiction of colonial violence.

Horror for horror.

And there is no question who the real bad guys are.

Received as an ARC from Netgalley:

This is easily the best written book Graham Jones has ever done, which is not a slight to his other work, more an extreme compliment on this one.

An immediately gripping and captivating vampire tale with a really unique lens. The horror aspects were really interesting, just when you think you've read every permutation of the vampire, a new one appears.

Great characters and a truly gripping plot make this a winner! If there's a better horror book this year, I'd be hard pressed to find it.

Special thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster/Saga Press for the ARC.

The one thing I must say about The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is this is probably one of the most American books I have ever read. And I don’t mean ‘Murica, but the whole of Turtle Island, or North America, itself. TBHH is not an easy read, either. Written with three POVs, across different parts of history, with one in particular, (1912 Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne), trying my patience/attention the most, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’s story opens up 2/3rds of the way through in a truly remarkable way. Stephen Graham Jones could have left more ambiguity but the unfolding traps, and ensuing madness, left a determined resolution truly satisfying. The vampire mythos was handled in one of its wildest ways possible.

A construction dayworker uncovers a journal from a parsonage undergoing renovations. The journal, one of Arthur Beaucarne, ends up in the hands of a professor Etsy, who also happens to be his great-great-grandfather. Etsy’s translation of Arthur’s journal opens up hopes of understanding what caused his disappearance a over a century ago as he shares his story of an interaction with a Siksikaisitapi named Good Stab…

I loved the book. It felt very much like of a lens on American history and identity and turned it on its head with vengeance. The characters are fascinating and bold, my personal favourite of which is the Cat Man, whose segment had me turning the pages faster and faster. After adjusting to Arthur’s dialect, the rest of the story pulls no punches on the gruesome, tough nature of the story. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter gets two thumbs up and I highly recommend it.

Incredible read!
This is an inventive and well written story. A combination of American history, tragedy and horror, it all comes together in a unique vampire story that grips you and doesn't let go till the bitter end.
The Author is so masterful..this story could be real, especially the way it's written in a journaling format. I listened on audio after a slow start by ebook. Definitely the right choice. The 3 narrators really brought the tale to life.
Grim and violent, it's also sad. The history of the American west is sickening...the revenge of Good Stab seems almost poetic in it's ferocity and bloody end.
My rating is 4.25 rounded for GR
Thank you to #NetGalley for this review copy. My thoughts are my own.

An incredible feat of storytelling. This is my favorite book from Stephen Graham Jones so far, it's brutal and angry and beautiful. Terrifically immersive, it's a fresh take on the vampire mythology (which is even more impressive considering how many interesting vampire takes there have been in the last year or so). Incredibly rich and compelling. I loved it a lot and it's up there with the best of the year for me right now.

Vampires and Vengeance: Review of The
Buffalo Hunter Hunter


You haven't read a book like The Buffalo Hunter Hunter before. This captivating,
disturbing blend of vampire mythology and Indigenous history offers something new to
the horror genre. Released on March 18, 2025, this nested narrative holds a dark and
cracked mirror to America's genocidal past.
The story begins when Etsy Beaucarne, a junior professor desperate to get published
and secure tenure, discovers the journal of her great-great-great-grandfather, Arthur, a
Lutheran pastor in early 1900s Montana. Through his ornate Victorian prose—equal
parts charming and suspect—we encounter Good Stab, a Blackfeet man whose weekly
"confessions" make up the bloody third frame in Jones's triptych.
Good Stab's confessions unfold against the backdrop of the American West and the
atrocities against Indigenous peoples, specifically the Marias Massacre—where
approximately 200 women, children, and elderly men were killed in their sleep by the
U.S. Army.
When Good Stab encounters American soldiers transporting a mysterious "Cat Man,"
the chaos of battle leaves him bitten and transformed. He becomes what Arthur,
reverting to his native German, calls the Nachzehrer—a vampire.
"What I am is the Indian who can't die," says Good Stab. "I'm the worst dream America
ever had."
Good Stab's vengeance against white settlers becomes Jones's most challenging
narrative gambit. The relentless bloodshed of the middle section tests our endurance.
The violence is deliberately excessive, forcing us to confront the scale of historical
atrocities: the Marias Massacre, the decimation of Indigenous populations, the extinction
of the buffalo. Jones makes us uncomfortable witnesses, denying us the luxury of
looking away.
Life as a vampire is no easy task. Good Stab suffers all manner of injury and oscillates
between starvation and gluttony. He also endures psychological torment. Like the Cat
Man, he slowly becomes the thing he feeds on, presenting him with an impossible
choice: consume the very people he hopes to avenge or become the thing he hates
most.
Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, isn't spinning a supernatural revenge fantasy.
Through Good Stab's transformation, he explores how violence changes the avenger.
The feeding metaphor captures how trauma can perpetuate itself across generations,
with victims adopting the behaviours they once suffered under.
Some might find Arthur's archaic language and Good Stab's Blackfeet terminology
difficult to parse. But these linguistic layers add authenticity and emotional weight to the
story.
Arthur, in particular, is utterly charming. His penchant for good food and affection for the
cat he rescues from a house of ill repute make him likeable. It's all the more shocking,
then, when he is revealed to be something of a monster himself. As he says, he "can be
convincing when allowed to paint with words." In this meta-commentary, Jones
1
challenges us to question the narrative frame we're reading—whose stories get
preserved, who interprets them, and how appealing prose can disguise monstrous
realities.
While The Buffalo Hunter Hunter may test readers' endurance with its violence, Jones
has created something unprecedented: a vampire narrative that uses horror conventions
to expose America's refusal to confront its bloody foundations. It's not just a timely book
—it's a necessary one, suggesting that some historical debts can never be paid, only
acknowledged. In Jones's American gothic, the real horror isn't the monster but the
country that created it.

This book is a piece of literature! This was the first book I've read by Stephen Graham Jones and I can tell why people love his writing. I'm not a typical horror reader and at times the book was a bit gory for me, but the story is so compelling, I couldn't put it down.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter follows a Lutheran priest's interviews with an indigenous vampire, Good Stab. Over the course of Good Stab's confessions, the story of a massacre of a Blackfeet community is revealed and Good Stab's journey to avenge them is undertaken. This book has so many narrative layers, there were times I had to reread sections to make sure I was following them all.

I really enjoyed the characteristics of Good Stab's vampirism, It was definitely an original take on the vampire. I found it interesting how Good Stab would take on the characteristics of the creatures and humans he drank from. I found the struggle between Good Stab and the Cat Man to also be an interesting sub-plot.

I would absolutely recommend this book!

"What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had"

I signed up for this arc after the premise hooked me in. In 2012, an old diary from 1912 is found. In it lies the horrific story transcribed by a Lutheran priest in Montana. Arthur, the priest, writes about peculiar confessions from a Blackfeet vampire named Good Stab.

Mild spoilers ahead🦬🦬🦬

This historical horror was a genre way out of my comfort zone. It is ambitious, sad and frighteningly bloody. The writing was hard to get used to. The beginning of the priests diary entries were confusing at first, but the Nachzehrer's Dark Gospel was gripping. The most unique part of this book was the vampire, Good Stab. And the way vampirism was written altogether. Whatever animal blood he drank, he became. His identity would shift from the white trappers he would consume to the animals in his surrounding nature. It was fascinating and quite morbid.

I think what really creeped me out were the factual historical bits. The Maria's Massacre was something very real, and very horrific. This book definitely makes you question, what is worse than a vampire? Humans killing other innocent humans.

Release date: March 18
Rating: 4⭐

@netgalley @simonandschuster

SGJ has done it again! This was a FANTASTIC read and it's now one of my favourite vampire stories.

A diary written in 1912 by a Lutheran priest is found in a wall almost a century later. The diary contains transcribed confessionals given by a Blackfeet man named Good Stab and slowly unveils a chain of events that go back to a massacre of 217 Blackfeet peoples.

I can't rave about this book enough. The way SGJ wove the very real history of the Pikuni people, the buffalo hunts and the colonization of the American West into a fictional horror story was masterful. The historical parts brought their own horror that was thoroughly heartbreaking.

The writing took a beat for me to get used to, as it usually does with SGJ. Once I got into the swing of it though I didn't want to put the book down. I was utterly captivated Good Stab's story and felt like I had been transported back in time to the wild west.

I also LOVED the vampire aspect. SGJ has taken this classic horror trope and made it his own.

This book is dark and haunting in all the best ways. I think it's one that even people who aren't horror fans would really enjoy.

Native American vampire horror meets Midwest historical epistolary in this intense and vengece-filled book.

This is my first Stephen Graham Jones book, but it will not be my last. Wow. I stared at a wall after reading this. There is a lot happening here and it fits together so well.

This isn't an easy read. I mean this in two ways, it's a highlights an indigenous massacre by colonizers in the 1800s and that's a tough read. A majority of this book is from the point of view of Good Stab, our native vampire who often incorporates traditional words into his story. As a non-indigenous reader, this means I needed to read slowly and often times re-read certain sections to ensure I was understanding them correctly. However, in Stephen Graham Jones we trust, because I never felt left behind. Even the parts I wasn't sure I understood where then circled back to and underscored.

We have two main characters, Good Stab (who has many different names, but I'll use this one), and Arthur a Lutheran pastor who is hearing Good Stab's confession over a series of visits. Arthur is writing these confessional visits down, then mysteriously goes missing, only for his great-great-great granddaughter to find them in the present tense.

Read this if you want
🩸 Historical trauma
🩸 Supernatural terror
🩸 Vengeance
🩸 Native American
🩸 A satisfying ending
🩸 Adorable buffalo (pet?)
🩸 GORE

This book is best read while cuddling your wild Buffalo bestfriend, and staring directly into Sun Chief's light.

In a world where history is written by the victors, it’s refreshing to get a different perspective on things. I think that we need to acknowledge that some really bad things were done that got us to where we are today. Call it “woke” or whatever you want, but I think that we have come to a point in time where we need to understand the whole picture of our shared past.

History isn’t always the most fun subject, I think that there have been a lot of dark times; some people like to romanticize about the past, but in reality, all of our forefathers have done and said things that just wouldn’t pass today.

I think that an author like Stephen Graham Jones is an asset to society in the current climate. In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter​, he takes a long hard look at a time that really wasn’t that long ago, a really dark time for how human beings treated other human beings, and he wraps it all up into a fictionalized story. It helps to get the other side of the story out there; it helps those of us who gained the benefits of the victors to understand the price that was paid by the vanquished.

Jones is putting it out there. This happened! My people did these things to his people. Unfortunately, what happened, happened; there is no changing that. But we cannot turn a blind eye to it. We cannot remove the books that are uncomfortable and only tell the stories that make the victor’s side look great. We need to reconcile our past. We need to be better. We need to make things right.

We need to stand up to people who want to allow the mistreatment of those different from us. We can be better than our ancestors.

*5 Stars

› Let's talk about the cover. This sad-eyed buffalo is beautiful and rugged reflecting the somber story you're about to read. It's such a dark time in history and I'm very grateful that Stephen Graham Jones took the time to share this knowledge. This is a challenging read - both in the way it's written and the subject matter. It may help to learn a bit about Piegan Blackfeet and the Marias Massacre (where the U.S. army killed 200 Blackfeet including women and children) before reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

› The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a story within a story told in an epistolary format. A diary written in 1912 is discovered in a wall. A librarian at the University of Montana read the old diary and found a name - Arthur Beaucarne. From this, she finds a living relative, Etsy. She's hoping to decipher the journal and discover what happened to her great-great-grandfather in 1912. She's also hoping to publish a book about it which will provide a stable career. We find out Arthur was a pastor. Through his perspective, we learn more about his life and the strange man who showed up at his church. We learn this man is named Good Stab. He's a Blackfeet man who wants to confess his violent past to Arthur. Arthur has no idea why Good Stab chose him to tell his story, but proceeds to write Good Stab's story and we get to read what Arthur calls "The Gospel of Good Stab".

› Good Stab was out with a group of Pikuni when they came across a wagon and a pale white man in a cage. It gave him a creepy vibe and its face had a strange shape. He named it Cat Man. What unfolds over the next 400 pages is a violent unveiling of horrible history.

› The protagonist is well-developed, but the side characters feel flat. I felt disconnected from the characters except for Good Stab. He's one of the best characters I've ever read and changed the way I think about vampires. The different points of view were interesting and added to the intrigue. Some of the chapters were too long and I think the story would have benefitted from having cut some of the repetitive parts. Sometimes I was pulled in and didn't want to put the book down, and other times I felt bored. Overall, I think the premise is interesting and I think this is an important story to tell. I like what I learned about the Blackfeet. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is certainly a thought-provoking book. I read an advance copy, so the final copy could be different.

APPEAL FACTORS
Storyline: action-packed, character-driven, issue-oriented, unconventional, tragic
Pace: medium
Tone: angsty, bittersweet, sad, suspenseful, thought-provoking, challenging, dark, sinister, bleak, disturbing, gruesome, violent
Heat index: explicit (18+)
Writing Style: candid, compelling, descriptive, gritty
Character: brooding, complex, flawed, diverse, multiple points of view
Racial Representation: Indigenous

Read Alikes:
Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice
The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo
Blood on Her Tongue by Johanna Van Veen

› Final Thoughts
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is an unforgettable novel about a Pikuni vampire seeking revenge. Stephen Graham Jones successfully created a believable and unique vampire story with a twist I didn't see coming. This book has history, horror, and heart and is about colonization, genocide, identity, grief, and revenge. In a way, it reminded me of Frankenstein. I recommend this to fans of vampire stories who also enjoy historical fiction.





Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is a mind-blowing horror novel based on the Marias Massacre of 1870, where the US Army murdered over 200 innocent Blackfoot people. This story is about a Pikuni vampire seeking revenge for the devastating loss of the buffalo and his community. Be forewarned, this isn’t a light read; it’s packed with death, both human and animal. It is definitely compelling but also gory.

SGJ’s signature atmospheric writing gives us a fresh take to vampire lore. He’s he’s created a not only a horror story but also a brutal commentary on survival and revenge.

Having read several of Stephen Graham Jones’s books, I can confidently say that The Buffalo Hunter Hunter stands out as one of his most impactful works. I recommend to both new & old SGJ fans and to anyone looking for a read that truly makes you

I love Stephen Graham Jones. A lot. This book is a ride. It strays a bit from his usual tone, in ways that work for me and don’t. This novel is a story within a story. An ageing professor is about to lose her job when it’s discovered that a diary written by her great great grandfather was dug up and needs to be transcribed. This is the outline of the novel. The diary follows the life of a Lutheran pastor in a small colony that is suddenly experiencing a string of murders. Within that is the story of Good Stab, an indigenous outsider who meets the pastor every Sunday to tell his life story and confess his sins with increasing tension and violence.


The beginning of the story and the entirety of the professor’s storyline didn’t really work for me. It felt a bit disjointed; I felt like we needed more chapters of Etsy’s in between to really know her as a character and how she reacted to reading the journal, as she is very important at the end of the story, but has no importance at all for 75% of the book. I also felt like the beginning of the story dragged on a bit and felt boring. There were also a few plot points that didn’t fully match up or make total sense to me, but these were minor.


Despite these issues, I adored this book. SGJ’s writing is like no other, and I think this is his best written novel yet. These characters are so complex and real, and the author makes you feel every moment of pain and beauty with them. This novel is incredibly bleak, it’s about indigenous genocide, animal cruelty, cannibalism and more. And yet, it’s incredibly beautiful at times. SGJ has a way of writing horror that can be incredibly disgusting, heart wrenching, and hopeful at the same time.

Weasel Plume 4ever

This book is intense, difficult, and brilliant in many ways.

Stephen Graham Jones takes on old tropes and reimagines them to explore powerful and important themes. Vampire mythology works very well as a frame to explore the violence of colonization and its effect on identity, language, and community. My favourite parts were probably the periods where Good Stab's narrative becomes increasingly dreamlike and mythological in tone. The fact that Good Stab's story, told through oral tradition, is only recorded in print by a decidedly unreliable narrator, reinforces themes in the novel around who gets to write history and what version of history gets held up as "Truth." There is so much going on in this one to explore and savor.

Although I very much appreciate what Stephen Graham Jones accomplished with this one, I did not always have an easy go with this. I feel like it could have been tightened up a bit and some of the most effective, visceral passages were followed up with anticlimactic repetitive sections that, in my opinion, could have been condensed (particularly Arthur's narrative and some of Good Stab's roaming). I am also, admittedly, not a fan of Westerns, and not a typical reader of historical fiction, so this may be a case of "this style is not entirely for me."

I was also both impressed by and at times exasperated by the language, particularly Arthur's sections. This is less a flaw and more a testament to Jones' skill at writing "of the period." I had an easier time with Good Stab's diction, even with the inclusion of many Blackfoot terms and turns of phrase, than Arthur's. At the same time, with the combination of narrators here, Jones really shows great skill at crafting distinctive voices. Arthur's style of speech/writing is a huge contrast to Good Stab's. I found myself rolling my eyes at Arthur a lot and just wanting to get back to Good Stab's story, which was much more engaging.

Overall, incredible work. Reminder to potential readers to check out content warnings as this one is a doozy. Thanks for the ARC!

I was pleased to receive the ARC through Netgalley and the publisher. The premise sounded appealing. It combines the worst slaughter of native people in American history, the Marias Massacre of 1820, carried out by the US Cavalry. Over 200 indigenous Blackfoot were killed in the attack, mostly the elderly, children and women. To this historical atrocity, the author has added a vampire revenge tale. This is a gruesome, bloody story, with the deaths of people and animals. The killing of buffalo, leading the vast herds to near extinction, resulted in the starvation of many natives. I can read violence in books, and usually have no problem with a challenging writing style, but regret this book was not for me.
Esty is a woman hoping to achieve tenure by publishing. She is an engaging character, and in recent times, she has been in possession of documents written by her great-grandfather, a pastor, in 1912. He described a man as an "Indian gentleman", who attended a couple of his church services. The man, Good Stab, wore clerical garb and sunglasses. He narrated his life as a form of a confession to the pastor, who transcribed his story. The author, Stephen Graham Jones, skillfully writes in a style that I believe reflects how the pastor would have expressed himself in 1912. I struggled with Good Stab's narration. He spoke in English, but many of his native terms were difficult to follow when translated into English. He referred to many animals, but I could only guess his meaning. I struggled to follow, and found myself rereading passages, skimming the pages, or skipping. It was a slow, tedious process, and the writing style interfered with what was basically an interesting, strong story.

I urge you not to be deterred in reading the book based on my misgivings. Many people gave positive reviews.

I really wanted to like this - I found the premise really interesting. Historical vampires and a theological game of cat and mouse between an ancient vampire and a Lutheran priest with secrets sounded like it was right up my alley.

However, the style and pacing detracted from the overall atmosphere, and it was a struggle for me to finish. There was a certain level of detachment from the characters, and I found it really difficult to care about the plot unfolding because I wasn't rooting for either of them, really. The narration was really verbose, particularly in Good Stab's sections, and the style of those sections was exceedingly hard to follow.