For this month’s “Vintage” theme, I went with a historical novel. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones is gory historical horror set in 1912 Montana that’s in conversation with Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. More importantly, it’s both narrative and meta-narrative about settler colonialism and the genocide Americans perpetrated against the indigenous inhabitants of the American West, viewed through a lens of revenge, survival, and atonement. Finally, it shows a long, difficult attempt at justice, requiring sacrifice and suffering along the way.
This review contains spoilers.
The novel begins with a frame story about a young faculty member, Etsy Beaucarne, trying to get tenure, which leads her to a document written by her many-times great-grandfather Arthur Beaucarne. Beaucarne’s hidden diary chronicles a long and bloody tale related to him by a mysterious indigenous man of the Pikuni (Blackfeet) once named Good Stab. Good Stab, in the course of a skirmish with Americans, had been killed and accidentally infected by a White person he calls Cat Man; after his resurrection, he can only feed on blood and can’t figure out how to die. Separated from the Pikuni by his new circumstances, Good Stab must kill to survive. At the same time, American settlers and soldiers are doing their best to murder the Pikuni and brutally exterminate the bison on whom their lives depend. Arthur is at first dubious of Good Stab’s claims, but writes them all down; the way in which he doubts the word of Good Stab seems normal to him, but to a modern reader is brutally racist and dismissive.
Good Stab’s story circles around and repeatedly returns to the January 1870 Marias Massacre, in which the U.S. Army massacred an entire village of innocent Pikuni; he relates the story in bits and pieces to Arthur, who is the German-speaking Lutheran pastor of a small town, which has been recently plagued with a series of murders, human bodies found skinned like bison for the “robes” on their large humps. It’s clearer to the reader than to Arthur that he was not chosen at random as an interlocutor, and that Good Stab is being both tricky and truthful, so there’s a dreadful inevitability throughout, heightening the intensity and horror of the plot’s climax.
I am rarely a reader of horror, but I would highly recommend this to those with an interest in the genre for its thematic complexity and for the emotional resonance that gives the deaths, both human and animal, throughout the story. Colonialists basically take/eat the colonized and everything they have, from their goods to their culture, so Good Stab’s vampiric eating of his enemies seems a perfect revenge…except he can’t stop there. He learns that in order to keep his Pikuni body, he must consume the blood of his own people, a slippery slope he constantly has to justify to himself, and which becomes less and less morally defensible even when his physical survival, and his survival as a Pikuni, is at stake. His entire story is a series of losses, and his increasingly awful attempts to revenge those losses that, in truth, can never be made whole again. Meanwhile, Arthur’s past terrible actions are made more cruel by how casually they were perpetrated. Arthur’s descendent Etsy, in using this narrative to try to gain academic tenure, is herself attempting to profit off the nasty fruits of colonialism, though being a woman in academia, she is fighting a similar insurmountable battle against patriarchy, and in the darkly hilarious ending section, strives to bring about justice.
As this is horror, there are a lot of warnings: the historical horrors of genocide and cultural extermination; body horror; human deaths, both adult and child, most of them gruesome; wasteful and cruel bison deaths; dog deaths. Historical references include the Marias Massacre, the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and the sinking of the Titanic.
For those not well-versed in American history, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz would be good preparation for this novel, or as a readlong.
