So I just read Stephen Graham Jones's "The Buffalo Hunter, Hunter" and it is the best book I've read in years.
I have never liked horror. I never found mainstream authors like Steven King scary but in recent years I've realized that is because mainstream horror doesn't ever deal with themes that are scary to me. Monsters are not scary to me, individual evil people are not scary to me, to me horror comes from society and the systems it creates to cause harm. I'm terrified by how individual people are usually not "evil" they are just people who when given the right ideology in the right society will do evil things. That has always been more horrifying to me.
Last year I watched "Get Out" and read the dark fiction anthology "Never Whistle at Night" and suddenly I got it. I understood why people enjoyed horror. I started reading SGJ's novels and I liked most of them but this most recent book- well it's is his best work yet.
If you like IWTV for it's queer allegory and it's meditation on grief you will be obsessed with this book.
The basic premise is a Blackfoot man in 1870 is turned into a vampire-like creature by accident. Decades later in 1912 he tells his story to a pastor as a "confession". I won't spoil the details of the story but it's themes explore what happens when a person whose people are being massacred and systemically starved by colonizers gets turned into one of their monsters. What happens when he has to consume his own people in order to remain like them? Can his newfound immortality be used to their benefit and if it can't be used to their benefit can it be used for revenge?
What unfolds is an epic revenge narrative with the perfect foil in the pastor who says all the platitudes, denials, and historical erasure colonizers use to justify genocide all while being just a "sweet old man".
It starts out slow the first hundred pages I wasn't sure I would finish. The second hundred started to intrigue me. The last 200 I couldn't put the book down.
Be warned this book does not hold your hand. It will often use the literal english translation for Blackfoot place and animal names, and if you don't know the fauna of the high planes and rocky mountains, along with their associated behaviors, it can be hard to understand what animal they are talking about. If you don't know the basics about high plains indigenous cultures and stories you will struggle to understand the significance of many sections. They are not stories, in this book the characters of legend are real characters that are interwoven into the fabric of the world.
The maternal side of my family is Arapaho and they have a lot of similar stories. For example the Blackfoot "feather woman" is similar to the Arapaho "porcupine woman", the Blackfoot trickster "Napi" is similar to the arapaho trickster "Nihancan" and the literal translations of Blackfoot words are similar to the literal translations of Arapaho words so it was pretty easy to follow. However, someone who is completely new to these cultures might find themselves reaching for Google. This is not a bad thing, Google is free, and frankly I'm sick of reading indigenous books that are clearly written for non-indigenous readers (I get they have to do that in order to get published a lot of the time but I'm glad we are finally moving away from it). I think it's a good thing it doesn't hold your hand.
Y'all need to read this book
