An instant New York Times bestseller, a chilling historical horror novel tracing the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice. A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.

Most of us had a lot of good things to say about Jones's indigenous vampire story. First, Jones is a very capable writer. Descriptions of both natural beauty and the tragedy of the buffalo massacres were powerful and memorable. The themes Jones is exploring about exploitation and colonizing are weaved into the vampire myth is clever way. And Jones has created a unique and consistent vampire mythology in line with those themes, particularly in the way that the vampires become more like what they eat and the way that becomes its own kind of exploitation. But that vampire mythology also becomes pretty dumb in places and therein lie the issues with Buffalo Hunter Hunter. NUBClub was pretty seriously split on how badly the missteps in plot and structure hurt the book. For example, there is a frame story about a modern failed academic who has the journals of her ancestor that reveal to us the story of the vampire, and this frame character features prominently in the conclusion. All of us thought that character made no sense and that the end was downright silly. But for some of us, that was a flaw in an otherwise strong novel. For a few of us, those kinds of missteps broke the entire story and those readers hated the book. What's interesting here is that in terms of the features of the novel, NUBClub had one opinion. Jones is a talented writer doing a good job depicting with appropriate and powerful horror the genocide of the American indigenous people and doing so with an original vampire myth. He does this with a forgettable and weak frame and a deeply stupid climax. How we felt about the book was simply how good we thought the good parts were and whether they could carry you over the poor ones. That said, no one would strongly recommend this book. Jones is a writer we might check out again, but Buffalo Hunter Hunter was just too uneven to fulfill some of its really great potential.