The Buffallo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

I started The Buffalo Hunter Hunter on the 12th of March and finished it on the 26th — 431 pages in hardback, and I absolutely adored it. I’m going to call it horror, because it is, but I’d argue just as hard that it’s also a crime novel. Honestly, it’s both, and it’s better for refusing to sit in one box.

This is a slow reveal, and Jones builds it through layers of story-within-story. It opens in the present day with Etsy Beaucarne, who comes into possession of a journal kept by her ancestor, Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor writing in 1912. Arthur is recording the confession of Good Stab, a Blackfeet man of the Pikuni — and as that confession unfolds, Arthur slowly realises it’s not the fantastical tale he first took it for. It’s a journey back into the history of the Blackfeet, stretching to a massacre of 217 of their people murdered in the snow. That massacre is the real-life horror sitting underneath the supernatural one, and it’s the engine of the whole book.

What I loved most was Good Stab’s voice — the way he uses Native American vocabulary, the cadence of how he tells his story. It’s a metaphor for the American genocide of Native peoples, and as the narrative peels back its layers of horror, both supernatural and human, it also peels back America’s own history: the murder, the pillaging, the stolen land, the blood spilled, and — maybe worst of all — the justifications dressed up as progress.

There were a few moments that genuinely gave me goosebumps. On page 170: “I’m the worst dream America ever had.” I read that line and felt it in my body.

Then there’s an exchange on page 311 that floored me. Good Stab asks, “How could you shoot us in our winter lodges because you were just Indians?” — and the answer he gets is that these were different times, a different breed of men, the kind needed to forge a new land and a better country. That’s the heart of it, isn’t it? The collision between the racism that drove the genocide and the language of “betterment” used to excuse it. Sublime writing. Chilling.

And because Jones knows exactly what he’s doing, there’s a moment from Etsy’s point of view on page 413 that’s darkly funny and still lands its point: “I give myself permission. Thanks. It’s what we white folks do.” That line is the whole book in miniature — people forcing themselves onto the land, stripping it of resources, disrespecting it, and slaughtering the Indigenous people standing between them and what they want.

So yes, it’s a horror novel with a real supernatural engine. But the beating heart of it is the story of the Blackfeet, what happened to them, and through them the history of America itself.

I’ll definitely be reading more Stephen Graham Jones. The Only Good Indians is next on my list.

If you’re into horror — or crime, depending on how you want to read it — go and get this one. It’s an absolutely beautiful book.