‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’ is Stephen Graham Jones’ horror masterpiece

Bear with me as I provide a little background leading into this review.

When I read to review, I slow down, take notes, reread passages, pay attention. I spend time with the book and in the book, not only using my myopic eyes to read, but also my head, my heart. I develop a relationship with every book I review (I didn’t say they were all good relationships …).

In cases where I have read and reviewed many books from the same author, that relationship extends to the author’s voice, their style, their recurrent themes, their entire oeuvre. For me, Stephen King and S. A. Cosby come to mind — and so does Stephen Graham Jones. During the past 20 years, or so, I’ve read almost (and I say almost because he probably published a novella while I was writing this review) everything Jones has published. The early stuff and the rare stuff and what some folks call “the pee book” — Flushboy. I’ve written about Growing up Dead in Texas and Mongrels, about the brilliant Not For Nothing and The Last Final Girl and the explosion that was The Only Good Indians. Also The Indian Lake Trilogy, which I’m convinced was responsible for the slasher revival in horror fiction.

Apologies for the long introduction, but I wanted to put my humble credentials behind this statement: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is Jones’ masterpiece.

It’s 2012 and they find the diary of Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor, stuffed behind a wall. The document, written in 1912, soon becomes a detailed chronicle of several massacres, a bizarre transformation, countless battles, and endless violence. Meanwhile — not as background to the action but as a present, vital character — Jones centers Blackfeet culture and history. That’s when magic enters the story. Moments later, horror follows. The diary, written by Beaucarne — “Three-Persons” — and Good Stab, a man confessing his sins, is an amalgamation of history, revenge, and the supernatural full of brilliant prose carried by two very distinctive, and often clashing, voices.

Historical horror can be a superb subgenre when done right, and Jones does it the right way here. The author easily transports readers to 1912 and then through a plethora of events that make up Good Stab’s biography. From early on, Beaucarne proves to be a jovial narrator with a sweet tooth, a kind heart, and a good sense of humor. But then Good Stab comes along and the narrative takes a turn into strange, dark territory. In the confessions that follow, Good Stab recounts many deaths, but Beaucarne has his own ideas, and some truths are really hard to swallow.

Beaucarne could easily have carried this narrative. So could Good Stab. Having them both here, talking and debating as the story progresses and more supernatural elements start showing up, is a treat. Jones’ work has often showed a chameleonic sense of humor that goes from easy jokes and snappy dialogue to funny commentary that goes much deeper and offers a distinctive look at what makes us human. Arthur is, so far, the best vehicle Jones has crafted for his sense of humor and passion for sentences that sing and curl around themselves.

But if peeking into Arthur’s mind is light with a few dark spots, listening to Good Stab’s story is understanding pain and violence, learning about brutal murder and the meaning of a young man’s first scalping. This dichotomy is where Jones shines. Two personalities, two very different people, two different races, and stories, and cultures, and lives. Good Stab is a haunted creature that must drink human blood to survive. Arthur, while flawed, is a man of God. Their minds and voices are opposites, but Jones weaves them together into one gripping story.

Throughout his career, Jones has been delivering unique stories that exist in and around horror. He has worked with strange formats, written entire novels in second person, and penned enough stuff about elk, bison, and now beaver, to leave a mark on generations of readers. However, he has also done something that, to many of us, perhaps matters more than all that. In his way, Jones has not only chronicled Blackfeet culture but also spoken through his characters against the flawed monolith known as “the Native American experience.” In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, the author goes back in time, digs his feet into history, and spins a spellbinding yarn about one of the bloodiest, most significant parts of this country’s history.

I said this is Stephen Graham Jones’ masterpiece because the prose is gorgeous and the plot is complex, engaging, and multilayered, but we have seen these elements from him before. Maybe I should say this is the novel in which Jones does all the things he does but even better than before. Basketball legend Michael Jordan had many legendary games; The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is Jones’ version of Jordan dropping 69 points against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Read it.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas.