your banner is art of Sole and Nene right? can we see the full pictures? đ
LOVE your book btw <3
Of course you can.
This is my favourite matching pair from the book. As a bonus, here's my second favourite.
That last one probably constitutes the loudest argument for posting the full-colour versions more often. I bet a lot of people don't even know they're in colour.
HI I'M BACK. finally finished COTMOF yesterday and am still sitting with approximately ten thousand emotions about how good it was. claimed the dubious honor of the first person to use Malacresta as a tumblr tag. I want to read it for the first time again somehow. in absence of a way to do that, maybe you'll indulge me a few questions...? đ€
I hesitate to simply call Nene and Sole an "enemies to lovers" dynamic, but asking as someone who adores that general premise, the messier the better, what was the process of writing their evolving relationship like? and how did you decide on the pacing? I would deeply appreciate any tips you have to give there. it's genuinely my favorite depiction of such a fraught evolution since This is How You Lose the Time War.
and re: Malacresta, would I be correct in assuming that a huge portion of his unspoken motivation in the latter portion of the book is, well, "fuck you, stop coddling me"? I get the impression he spends his time in the background wrestling with his neurodivergence the way Sole wrestles with genderâwondering how much of that is by authorial design!
Youâre back! I love it when people come back to tell me the book stuck the landing. I had a really rubbish long journey yesterday and what kept me going was the knowledge that I had a question about Malacresta waiting for me at home. Everyone use the established hashtag #malacresta malacheti to post your erotic fantasies about what youâd do if he offered to show you his rock collection.
First, enemies to lovers! I struggle to put Sole and Nene under that banner too, but only because itâs not a plot-driven enemies-to-lovers story. I guess famous enemies-to-lovers stories are often about two people on opposite sides of a conflict who realise theyâre very similar, and Sole and Nene are two very different people who have all possible external stuff in common. Same community, same friend group, dead fathers, mothers who misunderstand and fear them. They do have a fundamental internal quality in common, of course, and thatâs that lifelong sense of unbelonging in their bodies â Sole a dysphoric trans man, Nene a piece of God stuffed into a human meat suit, written obviously to be the same feeling â but that feeling manifests in each boy in completely opposite emotional and communicational styles, which is where the enmity comes from. Soleâs volcanically angry and also feels positive emotions like love and creative muse as violent extremes (I have a peer with BPD who reads Sole as having BPD, which is canon now as far as Iâm concerned), and Neneâs an eerie spin on Meek And Mild who hardly feels emotions at all.
If Sole and Neneâs weird romance works for you, it might be because their personalities arenât just different, but represent something the other person is deeply, deeply jealous of. When Sole is young, and doesnât understand his dysphoria yet, Neneâs placidity through pain is the most baffling possible thing â how can this boy shrug at a broken ankle, the death of his mother, the bullying I put him through, and I canât even put on a dress without crying? And I try not to make definitive statements about what Neneâs thinking, because what Neneâs thinking is the cosmic horror of it all, but his defining moment of surrender before he and Sole kiss for the second time is this:
Nene grinned a fiery, gaping grin. âI love you,â he said, giving me a reeling attack of vertigo, âbecause you hate me. You feel something deeply and perpetually that I have never felt. The very core of your being is distant and unknowable to me, like a star. I want to eat it out of your mouth.â
All thatâs to say: When Sole and Nene ask themselves, âWhat the fuck is wrong with that guy?â theyâre really asking, âWhat the fuck is wrong with me?â
When I was writing, I found that was the most essential thing about attracting opposites. The romantic tension isnât between two peopleâs conflicting traits, but between one personâs conflicting desires about what to do once theyâve ripped that trait out of the other. Crush it under their boot or eat it.
In that spirit, I came to see those scenes in the church crypt as the two of them trying to eat each other. Realising they couldnât â that Nene would leave without Sole no matter in what form and that Sole would never stop hating his body â and eating themselves instead. A million points of contact and none of attachment. Thatâs the pacing advice Iâd give you: Youâve got to give them time and space to get totally lost in each other. Tie the tent shut, bring the walls down on the trapdoor. Whatever logic should get them discovered doesnât matter as much as showing us what they do undiscovered. I wrote it that way because Iâd had enough of reading about wonderful insular character-driven love stories climaxing with jealous exes or secret underground organisations. Theyâll ruin themselves just fine if you let them.
Anyway, time for real character talk.
Iâm just kidding, but every time I get to talk about Malacresta I feel like one of those massive flaming stone block title cards has just fallen behind me. I say it all the time, but Malacresta was 100% improvised during the first draft, and I consider how perfectly he slotted into all the holes in the story to be kind of a holy miracle. And yeah, âFuck you, stop coddling meâ is exactly it. I opened my enemies-to-lovers ramble by mentioning the kind of enmity where youâre psychological kindred spirits but ideological opposites, and whilst Sole and Nene arenât that, Sole and Prasede absolutely are. Malacrestaâs arc is about being stuck between those two identical enemies - both his close friends because they're dominant straight shooters who balance his timidness, now fighting for control of him. Malacresta embodies that introverted, sensory-seeking, hyperfixated autistic stereotype which stirs that âSmol-bean-must-be-protected-at-all-costsâ instinct in annoying neurotypical people, and when Sole put him to work in the furnace, as much as sheâs the moral core of the novel, Prasede became that person. She misinterpreted Malacrestaâs autistic traits as a lack of intelligence and didnât think he was capable, yes, but she also misinterpreted his hyperfixation as unhealthy obsession and wanted to ârescueâ him from the work he was happily engaging in. I will now post in its entirety my favourite crashout in Crashout: The Novel:
âYouâre just like Prasede!â Malacresta yells. âDo you know what she used to say to me when I was making the green and purple? âLook at me, Mal, look at me.â Iâve never looked at people when I talk to them! Iâd read my own wedding vows to the floor! You made me feel like you gave a shit about the windows, like youâd picked me because I was best for it, like for the first time in my life I could be useful, and all you were doing was⊠babysitting me like everyone else! Thereâs no Malacresta in Malacrestaâs eyesââ I get up to run, and he chases me, rebounds the blade off the table so hard it completes the reverse of its arc. âYou want to see me, you look at the things I make for you!â
In Malacresta, I wanted to explore those times where the lovely, âI love you for who you are, not what you makeâ turns into the thoroughly nasty, âI can love who you are without loving what you make.â Toward the end of their time in the church, you see how badly Malacresta wants to impress Prasede with his glassmaking. He runs to fetch her whenever he makes a breakthrough, he draws a portrait of her in the drawing lesson and wants to turn her into his first ever glass picture. And she just doesnât want it. She thinks sheâs looking through it, but in looking through it, sheâs looking through him too.
With that said, I have deep sympathy for Prasede. When Iâm writing villain stories, I like to style a side character as the plucky protagonist of the alternate trail-of-clues horror story, and Prasedeâs that girl. We know she was the last person besides Sole to be kind to Nene before his death, so her fear of leaving Sole alone with introverted autistic boys has a very large, bloody, many-eyed precedent.
But yeah. Stop coddling him! Prasede wanted Malacresta on a pedestal away from the distress of work and Sole wanted him to create until it killed him. Whatâs important is that they both thought he was too weak and stupid to decide for himself, and Sole only learned better after he beat him almost to death in a fight and then Machiavelliâd him into a public humiliation ritual. What happens to Malacresta at the end isnât a cautionary tale against unhealthy artistic obsession; itâs too cold for holes in my glass house. Itâs about the oppression of his neurodivergence, and how dangerous he became when he was let loose after a lifetime of it.
WIP (Cassius) of a fanart I'm doing of The Teras Threat trilogy books. These books are soo good. I initially started reading it cause of the promise of queer naughty Bloodborneish universe, but it's so much more than that. The plot is so well planned and everything falls neatly together at the end. It's a satisfying payoff.
And the characters đ oh my god, the protag, Cassius, is so human and so flawed and charismatic! He is so lovable it hurts. All the other characters are amazing too!! Most of the characters in these books will steal your heart and break it :') it's awesome.
A full meal for anyone who lived through religious trauma đ and if you liked Bloodborne, you gonna love it too.
Make sure to give it a try (this is an 18+ read), Lucien Burr's writing is stunning!! Be prepared to be traumatized tho hahahahah These books have a lot of trigger warnings, so beware of that.
TV show: This is a TV show called Shits&Farts. It is about shits, & farts. The main characters are two men named Shit, & Fart. They tell shit & fart jokes to each other for the whole twenty-minute runtime.
at least one person you follow on tumblr, instantly: omfg im WITHERING from last nights epâŠ.. the dynamic between shit & fart is so fucking  tense and eroticâŠâŠim still fucking sobbing i hate my sweet babiesâŠ.. why do they treat each other like this im fucking BATHING IN ACIDâŠ.. its so goodâŠâŠ.. im EMBALMING MYSELF and then DESECRATING MY OWN CORPSEâŠ..
First, the reviewer's bare minimum: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best books I've read this year. It's Stephen Graham Jones at his most ambitiousâa 448-page historical horror novel that uses the vampire as a lens to examine genocide, survival, and the question of who gets to tell Indigenous stories.
It's a stunningly effective horror novel. The kind where you read a scene, close the book, stare at the wall for five minutes processing what just happened, then pick it back up because you're compelled to know what happens next. Jones understands that true horror so often lives in the spaces between what's said and what's implied, and he plays that gap like a virtuoso. The nested narrative structure could've been a gimmick; instead it's a ratchet, tightening with every perspective shift. If you stop reading here, you know enoughâfive stars, buy it, read it, be devastated.
But what struck me most, what I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I finished it, is how the book is an act of archival sovereigntyâboth within its narrative structure and as a work itself.
Before I say anything else, I need to be clear about where I'm coming from. I have Stockbridge-Munsee ancestry, but I was raised entirely disconnected from that culture. I'm not an enrolled tribal member. I'm doing my best to learn and connect, but I'm speaking from the outside looking inâsomeone who desperately wants to understand her people but knows she's setting off on a journey, not arriving at a destination. If I get something wrong here, I welcome correction and discussion. This review is, in part, my continued examination and re-evaluation of my own perspectivesâI'm speaking as a student and not a teacher.
Earlier this year, I read Rose Miron's Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, which documents the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Historical Committee's decades-long fight to recover and reframe Mohican history. Since 1968, this groupâmostly Mohican womenâhas been collecting and reorganising historical materials to shift who controls how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and preserved. They founded the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum, which now houses the largest collection of Mohican documents and artifacts in the world. For centuries, non-Native actors collected, stole, sequestered, and profited from Native stories and documents. The Historical Committee's work reclaims that authority. They are making themselves the source. (Aside: they are also raising money for a new cultural centre. If you're interested in donating to the effort, contact info can be found here).
What Jones does in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, in many respects, works in parallel ways, and reading these two works in the same year completely shifted how I understand the relationship between fiction and archival activism.
I'm citing Rose Miron's work on Mohican archival activism here because that's what I've read, and thus what's shaped new pathways in my thinking this year. I haven't yet engaged with Blackfeet historians like Rosalyn LaPier or William E. Farr, whose work directly addresses Blackfeet history and the contexts Jones is writing fromâbut reading this book has made that gap in my knowledge impossible to ignore. I've added to my list, and I welcome suggestions.
The novel is structured as nested archives: in 2012, a professor named Etsy Beaucarne discovers her great-great-great-grandfather's diary hidden in a wall. Arthur Beaucarne was a Lutheran pastor in 1912 Montana, and his diary contains both his own observations and the confessions of a Pikuni man named Good Stabâa being who can't die, who has survived since before the buffalo vanished, who hunts the buffalo hunters to exact a reckoning for a genocide.
The structure itself asks questions about whose stories survive and how. Arthur's diary survives because it was preserved in a wallâa white pastor's documentation of Indigenous experience, mediated through colonial institutions, missionary frameworks, and the English language. It's the kind of archive that has always existed and dominated: Indigenous voices filtered through white recorders, being shaped by their assumptions, their translations, and their comforts.
But Jones doesn't let that be the only story. Good Stab's voice breaks through. His sections are Blackfeet-dialected English, peppered with Pikuni terminology and left untranslated. There are no glossaries, no footnotes explaining what words mean or providing cultural context for non-Indigenous readers. Jones has said he writes for Blackfeet readers first, and this is what that looks like on the pageâlinguistic sovereignty practiced through craft. It's the same principle the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee seems to operate from: Indigenous people control how their stories are told, how they're accessed, and what gets explained. If you don't understand, that's not the storyteller's problem. If you want to understand, you can make the effort to learn.
I've moved to countries where I didn't speak the language twice as an adult, had to learn by immersion and context, so this didn't bother me personally. I picked up what I could, managed with what I couldn't, and trusted the narrative to carry me. I know some readers struggle with this; that's understandable, and I think it's also the point. Jones isn't writing for their comfort. He's creating a Blackfeet-centered archive within the genre of literary horror, and centering Blackfeet people means some readers will be on the outside. That's also what it feels like when your stories are held in institutions that don't serve you, in languages that aren't yours, with context you're not given access to. The discomfort is pedagogical.
The vampire mythology Jones builds is both familiar and unlike anything I've encountered previously. Good Stab must feed on human blood to maintain his formâif he feeds on other animals, his body begins to transform into theirs. This isn't metaphor, it's literal: consume what you hunt or lose yourself. It's the logic of forced assimilation made flesh. "Kill the Indian, save the man" becomes "consume whiteness or cease to exist as Pikuni." Good Stab finds a way to refuse both options.
There's a colonial trope here that could be uglyâNative-on-Native violence that absolves settlers of responsibility. Jones handles this possibility by making the violence a direct result of forced assimilation. Good Stab isn't violent against his own people because he's Indigenous; he's violent because colonialism has engineered a scenario where survival requires feeding on his own people. His violence isn't inherent; it's imposed. He survives by feeding on his own people when necessary, which breeds its own horrorâto remain Pikuni, he must consume Pikuni lives. It's an abhorrent choice, and Jones doesn't offer Good Stab easy outs. Good Stab is not noble or tragic in sanitised ways. He's hungry, vicious, and brutal. He also has his agency. He chooses survival, and sometimes survival is grotesque.
The buffalo are everywhere in this book, and if you view them as kinânot as resources, not as symbol, but as revered familyâthe horror of their extermination lands very differently. The systematic slaughter of the buffalo wasn't just ecological destruction, it was kin-murder on a genocidal scale. It was callously engineered to starve Indigenous peoples into submission. I know many readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, were devastated by what happens to Weasel PlumeâI've seen the Goodreads reviews and Discord discussions, and I know of people who struggled to finish through their tears.
That grief, with its singular source and focus? That's one buffalo. Multiply it by the millions slaughtered for little reason but to starve Blackfeet people, and the awful scale of what was done comes into focus. Good Stab hunts the buffalo hunters because they're killing his family. The supernatural horror is a secondary one. The real horror is that the U.S. government sanctioned the near-extinction of an entire species of animals as a weapon of genocide, and we have receipts. The Marias Massacre (January 1870) is the historical anchorânearly 200 Blackfeet people, mostly women, children, and elders, murdered by the U.S. Army. Jones doesn't use this as window dressing, obviously. It's the engine of the narrative, the wound Good Stab carries. It's the reason he exists. The book refuses to let us look away from that.
What also struck me is how Jones balances horror with humour. Arthur Beaucarne, despite being the white Lutheran pastor, carries most of the book's lighter momentsâfrom his affected prose and his earnest attempts to understand Good Stab, to his very human flaws. The humour doesn't undercut the horror; it helps to metabolise it. This is something I recognise from other Indigenous writers like Tommy Orange and Cherie Dimaline: humour as a survival mechanism, not an escape. You laugh because otherwise you drown. Arthur's sections often provide tonal reprieve without ever letting the reader forget what's at stake.
The epistolary format exposes the seams in all of it. The transitions between Arthur's journal and Good Stab's confessions jar at timesâintentionally. Indigenous history is almost always mediated, fragmented, and reconstructed from incomplete records put down by people who didn't understand what they were documenting and who would often simply change or omit things if it didn't fit their world view. The novel's structure performs a similar fragmentation while simultaneously offering Good Stab's voice as a counter-archiveâa record that survives despite the colonial frameworks trying to contain it, like all the stories and histories passed down within Native communities.
And here's where fiction and archival activism converge: Jones isn't just writing about a Blackfeet vampire surviving across centuries. He's practising Indigenous narrative survival through the act of publishing this book. By centering the Marias Massacre in a literary horror novel, he places it in the canon where it can't be as easily ignored. By refusing to translate Pikuni language, he asserts linguistic sovereignty. By giving Good Stab complexity, agency, and hunger, he refuses the "vanished Indian" narrative that still haunts public memory. The book itself becomes another element in the archiveâa Blackfeet-centred, Blackfeet-authored intervention in how Indigenous stories are preserved, accessed, and controlled, but also how new ones are created. I know that publication isn't protection, and that this book can still be co-opted, decontextualised, and taught badly, but it exists in the first place on Jones's terms, in his language, and that matters.
This is what the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee has been doing for fifty years, in many ways. They're reclaiming physical documents, reorganising archives, and ultimately making the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum and the Mohican people the authoritative source for Mohican history. Jones is doing it through fictionâcreating new narratives that centre Indigenous perspectives, languages, and survival, writing those stories into perpetuity within the literary landscape. Both are acts of sovereignty. Refusals of erasure. Insistence that Indigenous people control how their stories are told.
Reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter after Indigenous Archival Activism made me reconsider what I'm doing with my own writing. I write poetry, I write reviews, I'm working on a novel, and now I've been thinking about how those forms function as archives. What am I preserving? Whose language am I centering? When I write about books by Indigenous authors, am I translating for non-Indigenous readers' comfort, or am I speaking to Indigenous readers first? With what authority am I speaking, and what lack thereof? What would it mean to approach my own work as archival activismânot just recording my experiences with cancer, displacement, and learning to connect with my heritage, but actively shaping what survives, who has access, and what gets explained?
Jones has given me a model for how fiction, great fiction, can do the work of reclamation. You don't have to write nonfiction or history to engage in archival activism. You can create new stories that center your people, refuse translation when translation means dilution, and trust your primary audience to understand. You can ask people on the outside to do their own work to engage if they want to, just like you've had to do in a cultural landscape filled with narratives that don't center those like you. You can use genre fictionâhorror, in this caseâas a vehicle for historical reckoning. You can make your readers uncomfortable when discomfort is the pedagogical point. And you can do all of this while writing a genuinely gripping, terrifying, occasionally funny vampire novel that works on every level.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a masterpiece. Horror. Historical fiction. A meditation on survival and accountability and the question of what gets preserved. It's also proof that new works of fiction can function as necessary and important archival records in a people's ongoing storyâevidence that storytelling is sovereignty, and that Indigenous writers are creating the records future generations will inherit. On their own terms, in their own languages, with their own people at the center.
I'm still learning. I'm still figuring out what it means to write as someone disconnected from her culture but trying to reconnect. Jones has shown me what's possible when you refuse to let colonial archives have the final word. Good Stab survives because he refuses to die. The Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee thrives because they refused to let others define them. And Stephen Graham Jones is writing books that ensure Blackfeet stories endure in forms that can't be stolen, sequestered, or mistranslated.
That's more than horror. That's resistance. That's hope. That's archival activism in both ink and blood, and it's one of the most important books I'll read this year.
First, the reviewer's bare minimum: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best books I've read this year. It's Stephen Graham Jones at his
The difference between all their reactions kills me because 'hikaru' at best looks just mildly concerned but yoshiki looks like he's about to have an aneurysm and a heart attack at the same time
stormborns
dededos
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
