THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones ⭐⭐⭐⭐

If you wanted this to be bloody, consider yourself sated.

I honestly didn’t know this was a vampire tale when I started, which made the unraveling of Good Stab’s story less predictable and more organic. Pairing it with the abuse of Native American nations in the mid-1800s was perfect, with the parallel transformations of man and country both leaving one violent mess for another. The passages about the land and the people of that time were even better than the ones about brutality and blood-sucking. But no shade to the latter.

This was a bit of Cormac McCarthy mixed with Stephen King and an undertone of Bram Stoker (can it be a vampire story without it?), yet unique all its own. I haven’t read many books from this perspective, and I can tell Stephen Graham Jones is a stand-out in whatever this gory, historical genre would be called. Histo-gore-ical fiction? Regardless, he’s a master.

While it read on the long side, it’s a mash-up of many solid parts that was easily enjoyable the whole way through. As one of the author blurbs on the back cover says, Jones is a poetic prose writer who happens to write horror, and that’s exactly what you’re getting here.