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He’s ‘the Worst Dream America Ever Had,’ and He’s Out for Revenge
In “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” a Blackfeet man is transformed into an undead bloodsucker and seeks vengeance for America’s sins.
THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER, by Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones’s new novel would give Gen. Philip Sheridan fits. The Civil War officer is often cited as the source of one of the most infamous sayings in American history, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” and there are dozens if not hundreds of dead Indians in “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.” There’s also a very long-living or, more accurately, undead one who opines: “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.” Take that, General!
Good Stab is an Indigenous man from the Blackfeet tribe living in Montana around the time of the 1870 Marias Massacre, when U.S. Army troops killed nearly 200 unarmed women, children and elderly members of the Blackfeet Nation, a tragedy that figures in a multitude of ways throughout this gruesome joyride of a novel.
One day, Good Stab is caught in a violent encounter with a wagon train of white settlers holding a supernatural being in a cage. The strange, humanish creature is bloodthirsty, death-defying, antagonistic, charismatic and chatty. He’s called the Cat Man, and he’s a centuries-old vampire. During an ensuing skirmish with the white settlers, the Cat Man is freed and his blood gets mixed into a wounded Good Stab, who then becomes a bloodsucker as well.
Now released, the Cat Man preys on Good Stab’s tribe, which enrages Good Stab, leading to decades of conflict between the two. All the while, each is on a near-perpetual quest for vengeance against white settlers and for survival in 19th-century Montana.
None of this will be any surprise to readers of Jones’s past fiction, which has confidently mashed up various horror genres with pointed explorations of Native American experience. But two features stand out with his latest: first, the particular terms of vampiric living.
Rather than cloaked, castled mystery and wealthy Eurotrash vibes (familiar features of the vampire story, from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” in 1897 through to Robert Eggers’s remake of “Nosferatu” in 2024), the monsters in “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” are High Plains eternal drifters who have to drain their victims completely to remain vital. Moreover, in a mordant deep joke on the saying that you are what you eat, Cat Man and Good Stab inevitably take on the attributes of their victims, whether humans or animals.
