“I hadn’t realized that the other hide-hunters I’d been feeding on like they were white horns was making me dull and slow like they were. With this White Clay blood in me, I was starting to be Indian again.” – Stephen Graham Jones, ‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’
Hello the hospital—seeing a lot of these in 2026. The eight-year-old is here for some tests and no one’s having any fun, but we’re going to get through it. Don’t want anyone worrying over us, but appreciate any good thoughts y’all got to spare.
Not a bad time to check out the Lazy & Entitled Podcast, where Brendan and I are discussing—wait for it—the very same book the blog is discussing today! That’s right, our fourth book club episode of the year (The Barre Incidents | Every Galaxy A Circle | The Walls Are Closing In On Us). Four of these a year feels good. Anyway, here’s this week’s! Apple | Spotty | SoundCloud
What I’ve Been Reading This Week
One of my most anticipated of 2026. One of my favorite authors. Some of my favorite subjects—identity, humanity’s relationship with nature (we’re part of it), anticolonial vengeance, vampires. A book with a gorgeous cover and instructive title. A book that goes far above and beyond genre expectations and the promise of its jacket copy to create something that transcends genre. This is elevated horror, but The Babadook could only dream of this many layers. I’m talking, of course, about The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones: the setup is simple enough: an Indigenous man, a Pikuni, a Blackfeet, becomes a vampire. It’s the late19th/early 20th century, white people are shooting their way across the western U.S. They kill the bison, skinning their hides and poisoning the meat with strychnine. Our man Good Stab decides to fight the hide-hunters, as he calls them. Also narrating is a Lutheran priest, Pastor Beaucarne.1 Wonder if there’s more than meets the eye with that collar-wearer. Framing the whole thing is a woman “translating” Good Stab and Beaucarne’s narratives in 2012, in hopes that publishing them in a coherent form will get her tenure.
This isn’t a simple tale of vengeance, though. Good Stab can’t just Inglourious Basterds his way across the West, eat all the white people. For one thing, there’s a shapeshifting element to these vampires—they start becoming whatever they eat. Good Stab first realizes this side effect by growing chin stubble, the effect leads to one of the scariest images I’ve ever read: an enemy vampire the size of an elk, complete with antlers. It’s not enough to stop the killing of bison, Good Stab has to try to tend to orphaned calves, teach his own herd. Most crushingly, we know that all of this is a losing battle. If his goals are scaring the white people back to Europe (or at least out of The Backbone2 and the Great Plains), if his goals are to get bison population back up to where it was, well. This isn’t some alternate world novel. This novel is set in the real world, where we know we have at least have metaphorical vampires.
If there’s something beyond vengeance, what is it? There’s identity—how you come to grips with an identity you didn’t necessarily want, how to determine what kind of person you are, how to navigate the world. There’s retribution, which is separate from vengeance in that retribution connotes comeuppance whereas vengeance equates to passion. I’ve heard it argued that the majority of USian horror is fear of our coming retibution. What had to be done to assert the colonizer’s will over the land, what was done in our names whether we asked for it or not, whether we’re happy about it or not (because we’re sure living off the back of it)—ever think any of that will come back to bite us? What if it’s just one Blackfeet vampire doing the biting?
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? How’s everyone feeling about the new Polyphia? Definitely heavier than the last record, huh? After the release of “CAN YOU FEEL IT?”—a song I love—I was a little nervous the whole record would have these vocal inserts. It doesn’t! But two of my favorite songs do. SGJ talks about listening to Ozzy Osbourne while writing, which inspired me to listen to Blizzard of Ozz all the way through for the first time (Randy Rhoads rips, but I’m a Tony Iommi guy all the way). Anyway, if you like heavy stuff, check out new Polyphia. Wait for the beat drop/key change here around 2:15, with the modulated guitar riff about 2:30. WHEW.
- This was a good companion piece to Buffalo Hunter Hunter! Here’s Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on Lakota Resistance To The American Empire Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
- Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on The Earth Liberation Front and the Burning Rage of a Dying Planet Part One | Part Two
- Not a problem for this novel—Horror Needs To Be Horror by Dorian Dawes on their Patreon
- Of Course It’s The Screens. Who Are We Kidding? by Lincoln Michel in Counter Craft
- Two new stories from the consistently solid Elena Zhang in Gone Lawn
What’re you still doing here? More Polyphia? I like this jam session video, the guys seem to be having so much fun together.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Man, I know I say this a lot, but if you’re looking for a writer who can write working class characters? Check out Stephen Graham Jones. The poet laureate of janitors, the bard of the contemporary nomad, the wearer of coveralls. These are books were the anticapitalism doesn’t have to be explicit, it’s the air we breathe.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris