“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.” Much blood was spilled forming the American West into what it is today, so perhaps it should be no surprise this setting would make such fertile ground for a vampire tale. When I heard that Stephen Graham Jones—who has quickly become one of my favorite horror authors (check out my reviews of The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and I Was a Teenage Slasher)—was coming out with a historical vampire novel, I knew it would be right up my alley. When The Buffalo Hunter Hunter came out last March, I went to a release event at The Strand in New York City and got a signed copy of the special edition with red sprayed edges. I savored the book slowly all through the fall until last week when I got to the point where I had to stay up until 1:00am to see how it would end. Though this is my very first book review of 2026, I can already tell that The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is going to end up on my favorites of the year list.
Etsy Beaucarne is a struggling academic, desperately trying to achieve tenure while teaching intro-level Communication and Journalism classes at the University of Wyoming. When a construction worker digs up a century-old journal with her ancestor’s name on it, Etsy decides that transcribing it for publication might finally be the perfect project to earn her some academic recognition. Written in 1912, the journal belonged to Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor who preaches to a small congregation in the newly formed state of Montana. That year, the town is plagued by a string of bizarre murders where the bodies of unknown men were found skinned like the great buffalo carcasses that were left to rot during the mad rush for hides and tongues that drove them nearly to extinction just a few decades earlier. At the same time, a mysterious Native American man wearing priest’s robes and sunglasses begins appearing at the back of the pews during Arthur’s sermons, approaching Arthur afterward to take his confession. His name is Good Stab, but Arthur documents his tale as “The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel,” using a German name for a revenant that preys upon the living at night. Good Stab claims to be an immortal who feeds on blood to live, but is unrepentant about the scores of white trappers and buffalo hunters he admits to killing over the decades. So what dark sin is he here to confess, and why did he choose Arthur Beaucarne as his confessor?
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter makes brilliant use of the found document framing device to couch this historical narrative within the modern-day story of Etsy Beaucarne. The nested narratives from different perspectives are reminiscent of classic works of Gothic literature like Frankenstein and Melmoth the Wanderer. The distance created through this technique allows the receiver of each tale to question the reliability of its narrator: Arthur quibbles with details from Good Stab’s story and initially dismisses all supernatural elements as either pagan superstition or creative license; meanwhile, Etsy doesn’t know quite what to make of her great-great-great-grandfather’s “fantastical” tale. The reader, too, can tell that Arthur Beaucarne is concealing some secrets. Even the way he titles his own narrative as “The Absolution of Three-Persons” (referring to the nickname he has been given by Good Stab), suggests a grandiosity that he may not live up to. The book also plays with the confessional genre, a great Gothic example of which is The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. More recently, the author S. T. Gibson showed that the confessional genre is particularly well-suited to the musings of guilt-ridden and morally gray vampires in her Dracula reimagining, A Dowry of Blood. All in all, Stephen Graham Jones plays with structure in a way that is part of a larger conversation in the Gothic canon about authenticity, reliability, and reality.
Another trope that shows up prominently in this story is that of Gothic doubles or doppelgangers. While “doppelganger” is most often used to refer to characters that are physically identical, Gothic doubles can mirror each other in other ways. In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, the pastor Arthur Beaucarne and the vampire Good Stab are distorted reflections of each other. The first indication of this is visual: Good Stab shows up to the church wearing black clerical robes, much like Arthur’s, and it is never quite explained why or where he got them. As we get to know the two better, we can see other parallels, such as their mutual tendency toward gluttony. After becoming a vampire, Good Stab finds that once he starts drinking blood from any person or animal, he cannot stop until he has consumed it all—even if his body cannot handle the volume and will burst to release it back out. Much less gruesome and yet eerily similar, Arthur’s narrative is peppered with mentions of gifts of food from his congregants that he intends to savor over the course of several days but inevitably ends up gobbling down in one sitting. This shared sin hints at other and darker ways these two characters are connected through their flaws. While Arthur at first professes to merely be documenting Good Stab’s confession, it slowly becomes clear that Good Stab is drawing Arthur into a confession of his own. Both narratives build up to the dark secret that haunts each man. Etsy, meanwhile, shares some traits with her great-great-great-grandfather (they both have a fondness for cats, and for processing their thoughts through journaling), but she is in a position to break out of the parallel cycles of violence and guilt that Arthur and Good Stab are trapped in. Doubling shows up other places in the narrative, as well. In contrast to the dark doubles of the pastor and the vampire, there are a pair of characters both named Weasel Plume who represent innocence and connection to the traditional Blackfeet way of life. More physical doubling features in the way this story portrays vampires. Good Stab slowly becomes what he eats: if he feasts only on deer, antlers will start to sprout from his head; when he hunts only white settlers, he might grow a beard and begin to resemble the people he most hates. The effect is cumulative—rather than becoming the physical doppelganger of any one victim, he nonetheless visually parallels those he drinks from, preventing him from becoming too detached from his prey.
If you’re up for a beautiful but brutal horror novel about identity, vengeance, and guilt set in one of the darkest periods of American history, I highly recommend picking up The Buffalo Hunter Hunter! You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think in the comment!
This book was one of my favorites read in 2025.