At this point, Stephen Graham Jones has become a household name in the horror literary world. He’s won four Bram Stoker awards since 2017, and his 2020 novel The Only Good Indians was a New York Times bestseller. Jones has proven to be quite prolific, releasing eight novels, and several novellas and short stories during the last five years, including two in 2025.
While his new, uniquely designed, dual serial killer novels, Killer on the Road/The Babysitter Lives, have made more noise in the press recently, Jones quietly released what I feel is his best novel to date in March of this year, a diary-style historical fiction masterpiece titled The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter starts and ends with a wraparound that consists of the great, great, great, granddaughter of a Lutheran pastor named Arthur Beaucarne, reading the journalistic confessions between him and a Blackfeet Native American man named Good Stab in Montana in 1912, while a string of murders begins in the local township. Good Stab regales Beaucarne with the tale that starts with growing up in the Blackfeet tribe but stalls when he and his tribesmen come across a destroyed wagon containing a caged feral “cat man” inside.
From there, Good Stab’s life is changed in a blood-soaked instant, as he’s changed into a vampiric creature who must feed on the blood of the living to survive. Good Stab separates himself from his tribe, living off the land, protecting Blackfeet tribesmen and buffalo from the killing and poaching by invading white men. He lives through historical battles and massacres, witnesses the buffalo almost become extinct, and builds an endgame of revenge woven with massive amounts of gore and slaughter.
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To be honest, I really had no clue where the book was headed when the wraparound began, and it wasn’t until it dove into the old diary entries of Beaucarne, that I understood it as more of an Interview with the Vampire situation, with much more sinister motives behind the meetings.
The story shines the most when moving back and forth between Good Stab’s recollection of the horrors he faced at essentially every waking moment since being attacked by a vampire, and Beaucarne’s worries that at the end of the confession, he will become another local victim.
Jones’ writing has always captured the horrific in an amazing way. His descriptions of gore and bloodshed quickly paint a picture in the readers’ minds, but he’s never hooked me on this deep of an emotional level until The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
The historic exploration of the individual targeted slaughtering of Native Americans and the hunting of the sacred buffalo is heartbreaking to the core. With every trial of Good Stab’s, you come to respect the past and feel deeply for him and his people. You’re shattered along with him. You’re furious by his side. You want him to obtain every ounce of blood he needs.
I couldn’t help but run down many historical rabbit holes while reading this novel. It was just as educational historically as it was filled with mysticism and horror. Learning about the Marias Massacre of 1870, where more than 200 Blackfeet were slaughtered by American soldiers, and seeing how it fit directly into Good Stab’s story was heart-wrenching for me, and brilliant on the part of Jones.
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Jones’ usage of different Native American folklore to create his creature was refreshing, too, as he shied away from the overused tropes of European descriptors. Good Stab’s vampiric journey felt more spiritual than physical, though it was a nice touch that when he tried to survive off the blood of animals, he slowly transformed into them.
In pure Stephen Graham Jones fashion, the final act takes a wacky turn but still excellently ties the wraparound in with the story on a personal level, making it seem more like a connected puzzle and relating the reader to Beaucarne’s descendant, rather than the reader just being told a story from the past.
I love Jones’ ability to waver between sincere terror and absurdity, as I think it’s something that separates him from other genre authors. He’s ok with throwing things in that wouldn’t be expected or accepted in more classic horror works, but I do believe it can be more distracting than helpful to the story, which was the case with The Only Good Indians.
However, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter tweaks that blend masterfully, and even the absurd moments were intense enough to keep me excited for the next page. In my opinion, this is his most complete book to date, probably my favorite book released this year, and I strongly recommend picking it up.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is available at all major book retailers and was released by Saga Press.
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