This was probably my most anticipated read for 2025. It’s no secret, Stephen Graham Jones (SGJ) is one of my favorite authors. I talk about him and his writing fairly often. A release from him (of course) had my full focus. This is a review and just my thoughts on the novel and I’m going to do a little bit of a deep dive, so SPOILERS. Just be aware, there are absolutely going to be spoilers and if you’re new here…I will always ALWAYS tell you about spoilers. I’d hate to ruin someone’s experience so, I try to be upfront. I will warn you when I get into the nitty-gritty incase you haven’t read the novel. I hope you enjoy ❤
Everything I love about SGJ is here in this novel. The horror, and of course, heartbreak. The pacing for me was a little rough, I’d be lying if I told you I was completely pulled in from page one. For me it took a minute, and I was starting to get worried, but the last half of the novel I couldn’t get through quick enough. SO- be warned, it’s a slow starter. It’s a historical horror novel set in the early 20th-century in the American West. The story opens with the discovery of a diary written by a Lutheran pastor circa 1912. The journal was stashed in a wall and discovered in 2013 and was passed along to the last living ancestor of said Lutheran pastor. The contents of the diary are of the Pastor and his telling of a story that he’s being told by a self-proclaimed vampire. The Native American (Blackfeet) is called Good Stab and he is a vampire. So, it’s a story within a story within a story. The story is mostly told through Good Stab’s (the vampire’s) confessional styled telling…which is being documented in said journals. The use of the epistolary format makes it feel intimate—like it’s a story we’re not meant to stumble apon.
This was a hard novel to start (again, sorry) and there was a style with the story telling that took a minute to settle into. The vampire used descriptive names for animals and other people/things. There’s no glossary and you’re left just trying to figure out what this character is saying. Some of the language Good Stab uses isn’t clear—at least it wasn’t to me. Things like Long Legs, Wags his Tail, Sticky Mouth, and Sun Chief. I watched a lot of SGJ press for this novel, and I know this was a deliberate choice. It took a while, but I adjusted and it did add an extra emotional element to the storytelling . It also forces the reader to work through the context and as a result you become fully immersed in the novel. This isn’t a leisure read, the language and words the pastor use are complicated and his language is obscure and over-worded. The content is dark and sometime it’s hard to take in. It peels open and examines a horrific chapter in America’s history.
SPOILERS AHEAD
SPOILERS— Spoilers ahead, don’t read on if you’re not wanting any spoilers!
This novel did a really great job of blending horror and history. It is based on the real life Marias Massacre of 1870—where U.S. Troops killed around 200 members of the Blackfeet. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a novel that weaponizes history as horror, using the disappearance of the buffalo herds and the massacre of Blackfeet people as more than atmospheric backdrop—it turns them into active, breathing forces. Good Stab’s recounting of buffalo slaughter and cultural extermination becomes a narrative wound the reader must look at directly—no turning away. The book rejects the nostalgic, heroic cowboy narrative…instead, we see Western expansion as ecological devastation and ethnic genocide. The slaughter of buffalo is presented not simply as opportunism or frontier practicality, but as a targeted tactic of erasing Blackfeet life, culture, and self-sufficiency. Jones renders this history so vividly.
This isn’t historical fiction with horror elements, or horror fiction with historical dressing—it is a novel where history is horrifying, and horror becomes a method for remembering what history tried to bury. When the supernatural elements emerge, they feel like echoes of real harm. Jones is working in the lineage of Indigenous horror as reclamation: horror as a tool for returning agency to the silenced. This novel is also an indictment of white-washing in American cultural memory. By foregrounding Indigenous voices, Jones actively subverts the narrative of the settler-hero and exposes the way official history often erases Indigenous suffering. The book implies that the true supernatural force at work is not ghosts or revenants—but erasure itself. White-washing becomes a haunting: a distortion that persists. Jones uses the diary device, the uncovered confession, and the shifting accounts of the past to show how historical narratives are manipulated, omitted, softened, and rewritten to protect the conscience of the colonizers.
This is also a deeply emotional book. The scenes of buffalo slaughter and identity confusion strike not just as historical tragedy, but as this intimate grief. Yet even within that sorrow, Jones gives us something powerful: persistence. Good Stab embodies a history that did not end with disappearance, but adapted, endured, and remembered.
Rather than using horror to trap Indigenous experience in victimhood, Jones reframes it as endurance. The spirits that linger, the memories that return, the truths that refuse burial—these are not merely haunting forces, but resistant ones. In this way, the novel transforms horror into reclamation: a reaffirmation that Native identity is not fragile or lost, but ancestral and continuous.
By the final pages, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter leaves the reader with a sense of reckoning—not despair. Jones suggests that telling these stories is not just an act of remembrance, but an act of restoration. The book invites readers to stop accepting inherited narratives and to instead examine the silences between them, the histories left obscured beneath them.
Ultimately, the novel honors the resilience of Indigenous communities and voices while challenging us to confront the truths we inherit—and the ones we choose to carry forward. Jones doesn’t simply write horror; he writes return, revival, and resistance.
I hope you liked my review and what I had to say about this novel!! Did you read it too? Tell me your thoughts! As always, please connect with my on my socials. I’m always looking to network and make new friends!
