The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
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Stephen Graham Jones on The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A playground, a year, and a specific angerThe novel began on a plane, weeks before a graduate vampire seminar Jones had been teaching at CU Boulder was set to end. He opened a document, typed a year at random, and committed to building everything else around that single number. The vampire, the setting, the characters: none of it was decided yet. But the anger that would drive the story had been building for much longer, and it had a precise target.
I didn’t set out to write about the Marias Massacre. I did set out to come at the buffalo hunters, and I knew that I wanted to take them down on the page over and over again, just punish them the way they had punished the herds, and by association, us.
The choice of a vampire as the instrument of that punishment wasn’t arbitrary. Jones had been writing vampire short stories for years without recognizing what he was assembling, and it took a backward glance at his own bibliography to see it.
Probably about five years after Mongrels, I was going through my stories that I’d published for some reason, and I noticed that I had a lot of vampire stories... I realized that without really meaning to, I was cobbling together a monster I could believe in, a vampire I could invest in. That was kind of like the gate opening to me to the vampire world, so I could go play in that playground.
The first image Jones had for the book was a pastor at a pulpit, a Sunday congregation filing out, one man remaining in the back wearing dark glasses. He knew the man was Indian. Everything else about the novel’s frame arrived uninvited when he sat down to write that scene.
When I sat down to write that scene of an old-timey pastor giving a sermon on a Sunday, instead of writing it, Etsy just started talking. So, I let her talk, and it turned out that she was transcribing that pastor’s journal.
Etsy, the 2012 frame narrator who opens and closes the novel, was not planned at all. She arrived before Jones had a story, and then she handed him the architecture for everything that followed.
How he wrote it
Three voices, three sets of rulesGood Stab, the Blackfeet vampire at the novel’s center, could not be written the way Jones wrote his other characters. The problem was not vocabulary or period detail. It was the shape of a mind that predates both the scientific method and the industrial economy, a mind for which the line between natural and supernatural does not exist. Jones had to move his thinking before the voice would come.
Good Stab was pre-scientific and non-industrial... He also doesn’t distinguish between what we, in the Western tradition, call natural and supernatural. That’s all one continuum to him. Once I was able to click my mind over to think like him, then, his voice came naturally.
The novel uses a nested structure: Etsy, a 2012 narrator, reads the journal of Arthur Beaucarne, a vampire hunter whose journal in turn records what Good Stab told him. Jones built that chain of mediation deliberately, borrowing the problem it dramatizes from Black Elk Speaks, the 1932 account in which a Lakota leader’s words passed through a live interpreter, a transcriptionist, and a shaping editor before reaching the page. Each layer adds the possibility of distortion, and Jones wanted the reader to feel that instability throughout.
The outside narration, the frame — Etsy — she has access to anything she wants. She’s got semicolons. She could have footnotes if she wanted. It wouldn’t matter. She’s got everything. Arthur Beaucarne, he has those big old long dashes, and he’ll use however as a coordinating conjunction. And then when you get to the center of the nested narratives to Good Stab, he doesn’t have any dashes at all. And no semicolons, either.
Jones compiled this list of syntactic rules and passed it to his editors and copy editors so every voice stayed consistent through revision. Punctuation, for him, was not style. It was characterization.
Good Stab’s vampirism carries a specific curse that no other treatment of the myth quite uses: he begins to physically resemble whatever he regularly feeds on. Jones introduced this rule as an aesthetic choice, liking the image of Good Stab developing horn nubs from feeding on elk. It became the bind the entire novel turns on.
I never want vampirism to be like a superpower. I always want it to be a curse and I always want there to be a high price for it. That’s really important for me, and it’s really important that the creature has those clamps around it, such that it has to try to figure out how to live in a very tight, confined, rule-bound space.
Jones also refused to translate Good Stab’s world for the reader. Good Stab calls a grizzly a ‘real-bear’ and a wolf a ‘big-mouth,’ and the novel provides no glossary. When Jones was asked about this in the Howard’s Haunt video interview, he described his broader thinking about what anchors a reader’s trust in a historical world.
I think it is kind of important to give the reader not necessarily signpost, but like things on the horizon that they recognize as real and that reality kind of bleeds back to the story you’re making up, you know. [paraphrased from audio]
That strategy runs in two directions at once. The real history Jones grounds the novel in, including the Marias Massacre and the actual decimation of the buffalo herds, makes the invented elements feel earned. And the invented elements, particularly Good Stab’s untranslated world, refuse the reader the comfort of a guided tour.
The personal thread
His own people, his own historyJones is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Nation, and Good Stab is also Blackfeet. The Marias Massacre, the 1870 U.S. Army attack on a Blackfeet camp that the novel circles, is not a historical abstraction for him. When he described his goal in writing about the buffalo hunters, the language he used was first-person and collective.
I did set out to come at the buffalo hunters, and I knew that I wanted to take them down on the page over and over again, just punish them the way they had punished the herds, and by association, us.
Jones has said that every interview, every public appearance, carries its own weight beyond the book being discussed. When KRWG asked him about the novel’s existence in the current moment, his answer placed the act of showing up in a longer history of survival.
I think anytime that I pull up a camera or a microphone, that’s a form of resistance. You know, it’s reminding America that, hey, you didn’t do what you set out to do. We’re still here in spite of your best efforts.
On what the book is wrestling with
Vengeance, memory, and the cost of staying aliveGood Stab’s long life is not a gift. Jones designed the vampire’s immortality as a specific counter to what he sees as America’s defining historical reflex: the capacity to forget, rename, or simply stop talking about what was done. A human avenger could die, or age out of the fight. A vampire cannot.
American history is a horror story. America’s biggest power, their best superpower, is forgetting or pretending something didn’t happen. Good Stab, by dint of being a vampire and having this long, long life is a constant reminder that you did things.
As Good Stab’s campaign stretches across generations, his targets shift from the men who participated in the massacre to their descendants. Jones gave no resolution to whether that constitutes justice, and the moral ambiguity was deliberate. Good Stab does real damage to people with no direct hand in the original crime, and Jones built the novel to hold that tension without collapsing it.
He’s seeking what he considers justice, but he’s inflicting that justice upon descendants.
Jones has described his relationship to the horror genre as one of purpose as much as affection. He wants readers to turn the page, and he takes that job seriously. But the entertainment and the sharp edges are not separate projects.
What I’m really trying to do with my stories is just entertain... But because I am a single individual writing it, I have a single set of resentments and bitterness and a political stance. If I can hold on to that and not let it get watered down, then hopefully the book or the story can get to the shelf with some sharp edges intact and maybe cut some people’s hands.
What he wants us to sit with
History that didn’t make it into the classroomJones is aware that the Marias Massacre is not in most American curricula, and he named that gap directly when speaking to KRWG. The novel’s historical grounding is not decoration. It is the point.
I think Buffalo Hunter Hunter tells of a period of history that is not often taught in the classroom, maybe in the K-12 classroom. Anyway, not a moment that America should be proud of when they were trying to eradicate both the buffalo herds and the Blackfeet and all the tribes.
Good Stab’s curse, that he starts to resemble whatever he feeds on, means that hunting buffalo hunters risks turning him into one. To stay Blackfeet in appearance and identity, he would have to feed on his own people, the very people he is trying to protect. Jones arrived at this bind through an aesthetic instinct and only later saw what it meant thematically. He left it unresolved because he believed the novel’s real work happens in that unresolved space.
I never want vampirism to be like a superpower. I always want it to be a curse and I always want there to be a high price for it.
That price does not lift at the end of the novel. Good Stab’s long survival has cost him things he cannot name and cannot get back, and the reader is left to reckon with what it means that the only figure capable of remembering what was done to his people is also the figure most damaged by the act of remembering.