Review of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones offers an intriguing premise--an Indigenous man with supernatural abilities enacts brutal justice--but I found the story exceedingly long and both thoroughly gruesome and extremely tedious in its slow pace and details.

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”

A young professor determined to make her mark is inspired to pursue a project that just might earn her tenure: exploring the story of her ancestor's 1912 diary, found within a wall of a church during recent construction.

The diary's author is a Lutheran pastor who met and was witness to the fantastical, frightening, brutal story of a Blackfeet man who faced death, was an outcast to his community, and became set on deadly revenge against the white men bent on destroying buffalo and the Blackfeet and other indigenous tribes.

The man, who reveals that he was called Good Stab by his family and friends, appears mysteriously in the congregation week after week, dressed in robes and dark glasses. He insists on confessing to the pastor, and his story grows increasingly haunting as he recounts a harrowing series of events in which he pursues hunters, watches and waits, enacts brutal justice upon the white men, protects buffalo calves, and observes his former tribe while remaining outside their community.

As Good Stab's tale builds, it becomes clear that the horrors he admits to are only part of the story--his motivation in being with the pastor are deeply rooted and personal.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a horror/historical fiction story with key supernatural elements. I was intrigued by the premise, the revenge from a wronged Indigenous person upon the race aimed at extinguishing them, and the Western land and life.

I found the story long--the book runs 448 pages--and simultaneously grotesque and extremely tedious, as so many moments of Good Stab's supernatural transformations and details of gruesome killings are recounted, alongside long, slow accounts of his thoughts and internal debates.

I received a prepublication audiobook edition of this title courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio and Libro.fm.

More about Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is also the author of The Only Good Indians, I Was a Teenage Slasher, and many other horror books.