I finished The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones and I have... so many things to say. What a book. Incredible. So well written and haunting and creating something totally new in horror books I did not expect. Where do I even begin with this one?

The book is told in epistolary style, a series of journal entries within journal entries. We follow a woman in 2013 researching an old journal she found from a dead great-great-x grandfather of hers. It's about his life as a Lutheran pastor in Montana in the early 1900s and his encounter with a mysterious indigenous stranger named Good Stab.

From there, a cat-and-mouse tale begins.

Between Good Stab and Arthur, Good Stab and the Cat Man, and so many other characters. The web is intricately woven and expertly tied off. Jones is an incredible, thoughtful, emotional writer who makes us contend with a very real history we sweep away in America. What colonizers did for decades to the indigenous tribes in our country is nothing short of massacre, genocide, and annihilation. Not only of the indigenous people, but of everything that made them what they were. Their histories, ways of life, identities... colonizers of the American West in particular shredded and ruined so much indigenous life that the one overarching feeling I carried was shame.

I know that sounds preachy, but Jones deftly shows his reader and fearlessly makes you witness the reality of it all without feeling like it's preaching at you. He understands the complexity of modern racial and ethnic identity, the layers and layers on how we all ended up here in America, and he still unflinchingly says, "Yes, I know this, and still this is the story of my people."

I can't know what it's like to be an indigenous American. I know what it's like to be a descendant of Irish immigrants who came over in the early 1900s and a father who emigrated from the UK in the 1970s, but that's all. Jones gave me the opportunity to walk alongside an indigenous character and see what it was like for them to lose their land, their homes, who they were, their histories... it was heartbreaking and devastating.

And he used a fully reimagined concept of vampires to do it.

Yes. Vampires.

This is a vampire story that makes vampires terrifying again. Drinking blood from animals changes you differently than from humans. The identity he crafts gets weaker and weaker as he mixed blood from his people with colonizers and animals and you see how the blood changes him over time. It was an incredible metaphor for the diluting and loss of indigenous tribes in such a beautifully haunting, visceral way. We listen to Good Stab tell his story and Arthur slowly realize the role he played in it.

Then we see Etsy, his current-day granddaughter, unravel the threads of what he did and why Good Stab decided to tell Arthur his tale. She pulls apart the horror of knowing her kin could be part of this erasure and how she seeks forgiveness and restitution in a way that actually means something. Then we, the reader, are left understanding that what colonizers did to the American peoples can never give the restitution they deserve or require for what was done to them.

Jones shows his readers how the massacre of buffalo was the death sentence of the tribes. The careless, thoughtless ways men destroyed the once-prolific source of life into extinction and how it demolished a nation we claim to love as our own. Too many people don't know about how and why the buffalo were nearly extinct in the 1800s and Jones aims to correct that in this haunting, terrible story.

He made me consider myself, my role in the world, and stare into a national history that I might feel removed from, but is still a part of me whether I like it or not just as the suffering of indigenous people is a part of them whether they like it or not.

Beautiful. Incredible. And my favorite quote should tell you what kind of book you're getting into.

"I was America's worst nightmare. I was an Indian who could not die."