Currently, the two go-to authors for my regularly scheduled horror fix are Grady Hendrix and Stephen Graham Jones, and, while 2025 has been a mess in pretty much every other conceivable way, the year has already provided me with top-shelf entertainment from both.
January kicked off with Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, a study of institutional misogyny and witchcraft as female empowerment set in the turbulent 1970s at a home for unwed mothers. Seemingly not be outdone when it comes to mixing and matching classic genre tropes with unexpected settings, Jones’s latest, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, is part historical diary, part Old West cowboy fiction, and part slow-burn revenge story.
When academic Etsy Beaucarne is contacted about the discovery of a journal penned by an unknown great-great-grandfather, she thinks the manuscript might be just the shot in the arm that her flagging career needs. Instead, she uncovers a startling tale packed to the rafters with generational trauma, cold-blooded murder, and hot-blooded vampirism.
The intrigue begins in 1912 when a peculiar figure appears at Arthur’s regular Sunday service just as a rash of equally peculiar murders—wherein the victims are found brutally skinned like discarded buffalo—grips his small Montana community. Though quickly revealed to be a Lutheran minister (and one prone to overindulgence at that), Arthur Beaucarne agrees to hear the confession of this stranger, a Blackfoot of the Pikuni band known as Good Stab.
Good Stab’s testimony seems like a slice of traditional pulp Western fare until it quickly devolves into an account of supernatural curses and ceaseless bloodlust. Accidentally infected by the Cat Man, an eldritch vampire held captive by the white settlers, Good Stab becomes boogeyman to friend and foe alike, learning that, if he feeds on animals, he becomes more animalistic and, if he feeds on the settlers, he too begins to take on their countenance.
Now damned to feed on Pikuni to simply remain Pikuni, Good Stab is met at every turn with misfortune, danger, and disappointment, and as his confession stretches on over subsequent Sundays, the skeptical Pastor Beaucarne finds its gory details easier and easier to believe as he recounts them in startling detail in his own journal.
Masterfully shifting between the voices of Arthur, Good Stab, and Etsy, Stephen Graham Jones weaves a compelling story that crosses the centuries without so much as breaking a sweat. His writing is further bolstered by framing the narrative alongside real-world events that shaped and continue to shape Indigenous American culture—in this case the near extinction of the American bison due to overhunting by Europeans and the 1870 Marias Massacre of the Piegan Blackfeet by the U.S. Army.
Both deliberately come into focus as Good Stab’s ancient past intertwines with Arthur’s own dark secrets, reverberating even to the modern day of granddaughter Etsy.
Vicious and visceral, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is Stephen Graham Jones at his best. With all his influences on display—from slasher cinema to Louis L’Amour frontier tales to the Native American Renaissance—Jones winks at more conventual undead narratives (like that other novel about interviewing a bloodsucker) while simultaneously decolonizing vampire lore.
If you’d asked me a few years ago about my favorite Stephen Graham Jones novel, I would’ve confidently said My Heart Is a Chainsaw. If you’d asked me last year, I reckon I would’ve amended that to I Was a Teenage Slasher. Right now, as much as I want to give The Buffalo Hunter Hunter the crown, I’m beginning to suspect that the only correct answer to which SGJ book is best is… well… the next one.
An uncorrected proof of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter was provided for this review. This post contains affiliate links. Justice for my boy Weasel Plume!
