Buffalo Hunter Hunter, the BEST Vampire Novel I've Ever Read, or Genocidal Horror III

Stephen Graham Jones’s 2025 Buffalo Hunter Hunter, which is by far the best vampire novel I have ever read, and which will undoubtedly be adapted into an American full length feature film sometime in the next couple of years is also one of the most important meditations on the nature of revenants, history, genocide, oppression, and revenge that I have ever had the privilege to read.

The novel is called Buffalo Hunter Hunter because it centers on a character who hunts down those who hunt down the buffaloes: buffalo hunter hunter. Specifically, it turns out, as the story magnificently unfolds from the recovered diary of a 19th century Montana Lutheran pastor, that a Pikuni man named Good Stab had been attacked by a white vampire in 1870 and converted to the status of what the novel calls at all turns a Nachzehrer, which is German for revenant, or, literally, “after-eater.” Someone who returns—from death—to feed anew. Once he is transformed into a Nachzehrer, Good Stab struggles with his identity mightily—not wanting to be this undead thing that he is—until he realizes that he can systematically kill the white settler colonialists who are eradicating the North American population not only of Native Peoples, but also of Blackhorns—buffalo. Buffalo hunter hunter.

On only that basis, the novel resounds harmoniously with Blood Quantum in being a horror narrative about how Native American peoples survive a catastrophic climate collapse. Both, that is, are both revenant horror and eco-horror. But of course, whereas Blood Quantum is reimagining first-contact plague devastation now, in the 21^st century, as a zombie pathogen to which Native Peoples are immune, Buffalo Hunter Hunter reimagines the real historical past but keeps it largely in the past. That is, Jones revises history to introduce a vigilante avenger of the horrific violence done both to Native Peoples and to the indigenous natural and animal environment of North American by white settlers. This Nachzehrer doesn’t indiscriminately feed on anyone who gets in his way; for most of the novel, he preferentially feeds on white buffalo hunters. Jones casts him, in effect, as a top predatory species whose purpose is to rebalance the ecosystem by taking out the invasive top predator species of the white settler, who, in turn, have been disproportionately picking off buffalo, and damaging the indigenous landscape and ecosystem.

Now, again, everyone is going to think of this novel as a vampire novel. And for good reason: Good Stab’s monsterized form drinks blood (preferably human blood), gets burned (though not fatally) by sunlight, and is functionally immortal (even a stake through the heart doesn’t seem to do the trick here). Jones himself, in the novel’s afterword, talks about how this novel emerged directly from his reading and thinking and teaching a lot about vampires and vampire fiction. So, fair enough: Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a “vampire” novel. But you know what? It's not just that, and Jones knows it. That’s why the novel itself judiciously and scrupulously avoids mention of that term. Good Stab is referred to in the novel almost exclusively as a Nachzehrer, an after-eater, or consuming revenant. There is even a moment where the word “vampire” is referred to in a circumlocution, the speaker talking about two syllables that refer to something unspeakable—the vampire, Good Stab. But the usage of the term vampire itself is deferred until the very ending of the novel, when the narrator—a female academic named Etsy Beaucarne, who is the descendent of Good Stab’s main enemy in the main novel—sees Good Stab walking away into a snowstorm. She says to herself, “He turned his back on me and he fell in with his people, riding west for the Backbone, and within a few paces, the storm had folded the nachzehrer into itself. No, not the vampire. The Blackfeet.” (424) At this perfect, luminous, haunting ending moment, Jones outs Good Stab as, in fact a vampire. Which really, we’d known for most of the novel. But he makes sure to continue to associate the “vampire” with the idea of the “nachzehrer,” which, again, has the specific meaning of someone who returns to consume again. And from there, he decouples Good Stab’s monstrosity—his “vampire” status—from his Native status, suggesting that it’s the Blackfeet who are, ultimately, those who return to consume again. The Blackfeet are, at this final moment, the revenants.

So, what’s at stake in that assertion? Why claim the Blackfeet as the real revenants? On a certain level, it’s counterintuitive, to argue that the Blackfeet, who were systematically oppressed and killed by white settlers, should be collapsed with this category of monstrosity—the revenant, the after-eater, the again-consumer. But, all throughout the novel, Good Stab had been our primary empathic link, our hero, in spite of (or maybe because of) his monstrosity. That is, one of the biggest interpretive moves Jones makes in this novel is to make the revenant/vampire the hero, without taking from him his own monstrosity. The revenant is still horrific and terrifying, still monstrous. In fact, Good Stab is crystal clear throughout the novel that he hates himself, and sees himself as unnatural, as antithetical to anything good. And yet, he’s still unquestionably the hero of the novel. Because he’s not only horrific. He’s also just, long-suffering, alone, powerful, strategic, smart, and compelling. He’s enacting revenge for an unthinkable historical reality of racial and ecosystemic violence. He’s a warrior. A hunter. Not just a monster, but still a monster. Similar, in fact to la Llorona: clearly monstrous, clearly terrifying, but also empathogenic and, for lack of a better word, likeable.

On its own, this constitutes a major innovation into the revenance/zombie/vampirism sub-genre of horror. In almost all cases, artful depictions of revenants cast them unequivocally as monsters, at least since the Afro-Caribbean tradition of zombie hit the United States and since Bram Stoker et all became popular. In Jones's novel, it is impossible not to identify with, like, admire, and fear Good Stab. And of course, as the novel itself makes clear in its ending, Good Stab is not only the novels main Nachzehrer, he also synecdochally represents his people, the Pikuni Blackfeet. In that ending scene, we are made to recognize that Good Stab has become the avenging force for the Pikuni, that he is a way of imagining—with a heavy robing of horror on it—a mode of transhistorical survivance for Native Peoples, in which all the death and destruction of history might somehow spontaneously resurrect itself, and come searching for blood, for retribution.

This dynamic takes its clearest form in the overt plot arc of the novel. The novel is based around a journal written in the early 20th century by the Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne and found by and found by his descendent in the 21^st century. This journal is structured in turn by two parts: one is the pastor's own diary, and the other, interleaved with the diary, is his account of the confession made to him over the course of many individual nocturnal sessions of the revenant Good Stab. These confessions took place in 1912, some 40 years after good stabs initial conversion from a human Pikuni man into a revenant. What slowly becomes clear over the course of Good Stab’s conversation with this Lutheran pastor, is that Good Stab has been tracking him down for many years, because he participated in the slaughter of over 100 totally innocent Pikuni people, way back in 1870. This Lutheran pastor stands in for the totality and brutality of white settler violence against Native Peoples; Good Stab stands in for all the Native People’s who have been killed, except that he has come back.

This, of course, is where some of the extraordinary power of the narrative lies, in the imagining of a scenario of undeath, or rather, an operationalizing of the category of the revenant as a way of thinking about rewriting and redeeming history, or rewriting history so as to cause those who often end up being the writers of history—which is to say, the despoilers, the conquerors, the settler colonialists—to become the victims of their own rapacity, greed, and violence, refracted through an undead avenger, who, in turn, embodies precisely rapacity, greed, and violence. Good Stab is unslakeable hunger, come to take vengeance on those whose unslakeable hunger for money and land fueled the genocide of countless indigenous tribes in the Americas. I sobbed as I read through this novel—an emotional response experienced again and again by Good Stab himself, who seems constantly to be wiping bloody tears off of his face, in horror at what has happened to his people, his buffalo, and his world, as well as in horror at what he has become. Because Jones fully grasps about horror its radical adjacency to another genre: tragedy.

The tragedy for Good Stab is that he doesn’t want to be what he has become. He doesn’t want to be a nonhuman. He wants to be a Pikuni man, with a lodge, and a family. He wants to laugh and eat “real-meat,” smoke his father’s pipe, and laugh with his friends. Instead, his body rebels against his every wish: he can’t be with people, because eventually, he will go mad with bloodlust and eat them. He can’t eat anything other than blood; he can survive on the blood of animals, but he is slowly turned into them by drinking it, developing small horns on his head when he tries to train blackhorns in preference to people. So, really, he’s constrained to drink human blood, to the extent that he wants to maintain his own humanity in some way. He can’t smoke tobacco, because, when it does, it fills up his lungs and nearly kills him for real; in the most painful scene of the novel, he is briefly reunited with his beloved father, who offers him a pipe. Good Stab draws on it, and nearly dies. He breaks his father’s beloved pipe, which reads as a symbolic break with any fantasy he might still have of returning to a normal life as a normal Pikuni man again, and has to be nursed back to health over several winters by Napi, the trickster god and creator of the Pikuni religion. So, no pipe for Good Stab. No human contact, unless it’s predation. No family. Only the desperate hunger for blood and the orgiastic release of filling himself up on it.

Adding to all of this pathos, it turns out that if Good Stab drinks the blood of white people, he slowly becomes white, like them. Which means that if he wants to maintain his own Pikuni-ness at all, he is obligated to drink the blood of Pikuni. An unthinkable conundrum: to feed off the very people whose systematic murder and violation he lives (or unlives) to avenge. But there you have it: Jones’s novel is one that forces us to dwell perpetually in dualistic states like this, states of hope and desperation, states of revulsion and excitation. The reason for that dualism is that he’s trying to export to us some scintilla of that more basic duality, Good Stab’s own duality, which is being alive, while also having been killed. Which, in turn, is also the reality for so many indigenous peoples, in the allegorical logic of this novel.

____

My book on Horror, American history, and feminism, SCREAM WITH ME, will be published from Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in September of 2025! Please preorder here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scream-with-Me/Eleanor-Johnson/9781668087633