Book Review: THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER

MY RATING: Recommended*

REVIEW: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a moody, often fever-dream-like, occasionally brutal vampire novel set against some of the bloodiest moments of Montana history. It is part vampire memoir, part family drama, and part mystery, takes a number of surreal turns, and plays with modern expectations of vampire lore – all of which adds up to a thrilling, engrossing, and thought-provoking novel.

The set-up: Etsy Beaucairne is informed of the discovery of a journal written by her great-grandfather Arthur, a Lutheran priest in Miles City Montana in the early 1900s. The journal is not only a link to lost family history, it may also provide Etsy with a way to move her stalled life forward. What she discovers in the journal is the confession of a Blackfeet Indian named Good Stab, who professes to be a vampire. Good Stab also appears to be behind a string of deaths and disappearances in both San Francisco and Miles City. The book alternates between Etsy’s 2020’s present, Arthur’s journal entries in the 1910s as he's taking the confession, and Good Stab’s recounting of his existence through the 1800s.

Good Stab’s memoir is the most surreal, fever-dream like part of the book (at least until near the end), especially in his early days as a vampire coming to understand what he has become, what he can do, and the limitations he is faced with. It is here that Jones plays most with genre expectations of a vampire’s existence and abilities, as the blood Good Stab consumes affects not only his physical appearance but his cognitive abilities. (If there are other vampire novels that touch on this the way Jones does, I haven’t come across them yet.) Good Stab is not the sparkly teen or brooding aristocrat of so much modern vampire fiction, but he has more character depth than the vampires of fiction from the Gothic era. There is also no romance in his story – but there are moments of unexpected beauty in his connection to the natural world and to his people.

There is also a lot of mystery connected to the telling of Good Stab’s story. Why has he chosen Arthur to tell his story to, and why now? What is Good Stab’s connection – if any – to the spate of dead bodies showing up on the outskirts of Miles City? Arthur’s personal history has some mystery as well, alluded to and hinted at in his self-observations throughout the journal: how did he come to be a pastor in this frontier town? How did he get the injury that affects his ability to walk? I would describe this mystery element of the book as “fair play:” in that the answers to all of these questions are embedded, some subtly, in the narrative and after the reveals the reader can go back and string those hints together.

The mystery also ties into the family drama, as Etsy tries to understand her great-grandfather’s journal in the context of what her family knew and didn’t know about his life and disappearance. Etsy and Arthur both encounter crossroads at which revealed knowledge forces a decision that will change the course of their lives.

Throughout the book Jones deals straightforwardly with how colonialism and American westward expansion affected the native population, and how steeped in blood the history of Montana (and by extension, all of the American West) is – a history many of us did not learn about in school, a history we should know about and learn from.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is not an easy read, but it is an engrossing and thought-provoking one. I recommend it.

*I have moved away from a star-based rating system here on the blog (I can’t avoid using stars on Goodreads, NetGalley, and the various bookseller sites). Instead I am switching to ranking books as “highly recommended,” “recommended,” “satisfactory” and “not right for me.” I may add other levels as I refine this concept. I’ll be including this note in all of my reviews for the next several weeks.

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. I finished the book well before the release date but fell behind posting reviews. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is available now wherever books are sold.

Sunday Shorts: The Shivers

TITLE: The Shivers

AUTHORS: various

194 pages, Amazon Originals, (e-book and audiobook)

MY RATING: 4 stars out of 5

REVIEW: The five short stories in Amazon’s The Shivers collection all capably fulfill the promise of the collection’s title: they all made me shiver at least once, and most more than that. While they all have some supernatural element (some slowly revealed, some blatant from the start, and mostly all in the form of ghostly presences of some kind), they are mostly absent of jump scares and gore. They are more on the suspenseful side of horror, an interesting blend of the psychological and the supernatural. All of the stories have a grounding in the everyday that is slowly (or, as slowly as one can in a short story) infused with dread and then outright horror.

In Joe Hill’s “Jackknife,” a disgraced college professor at loose ends slowly realizes there is something not right about the tree from which he recently removed a rusted old jackknife. In Stephen Graham Jones’ “The Indigo Room,” a dramatic office presentation turns dark, eerie, and prophetic. Grady Hendrix’s “The Blanks” takes place in an almost too idyllic island summer community whose secrets are hinted at before being revealed, while Catriona Ward’s “Day and Night in Misery” tweaks the haunted hotel room trope in a most moving way. The collection concludes with “Letter Slot” by Owen King, focused on a teen boy living in poverty on the same road as an abandoned McMansion to which he is inexorably drawn.

While I’ve read stories or novels by Joe Hill, Owen King, Stephen Graham Jones, and Grady Hendrix (but only one short story in Hendrix’s case), this was my first exposure to Catriona Ward’s work, and her story (like the others) definitely made me want to read more (readers, feel free to recommend what Ward book I should read next!). All five authors understood the assignment here and delivered on it. Hill’s story is probably the most outright horror/least suspenseful. Jones’s is absolutely the most surreal and otherworldly. Hendrix’s is the creepiest. Ward’s and King’s tie for the title of “most tugged at my heart.” I enjoyed all five stories and can’t stress enough how much each creeped me out.

For four of these stories, the sense of dread works so well because the authors make you care about the main characters through personal moments or traits or reminiscences that resonate. Suspense is more suspenseful, horror is more horrific, when you care about the characters who are in danger. I found the main character of the Hill story to be thoroughly unlikeable and thus less sympathetic but found the other protagonists to be relatable. Interestingly, three of those main characters are mothers of young children who are in some sort of danger, while the fourth is a teenage boy with a sick mother (a natural reversal of the caregiver/cared-for roles).

Fair warning for those who might need it: both the Ward and Hendrix stories involve child death. Both happen “off screen” but are recounted in enough detail that it may upset some people.

I received an advance electronic reading copy of this book for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The Shivers is available now in e-book and audiobook format only from Amazon, and can be purchased as individual titles or as a bundle.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Review of NIGHT OF THE MANNEQUINS

TITLE: Night of the Mannequins

AUTHOR: Stephen Graham Jones

136 pages, Tor.com Publishing, ISBN 9781250752079 (paperback, ebook)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): A contemporary horror story where a teen prank goes very wrong and all hell breaks loose: is there a supernatural cause, a psychopath on the loose, or both?

MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: Note: I read an electronic advance review copy provided through NetGalley.

Stephen Graham Jones’ Night of the Mannequins is a phenomenally scary take on the monstrous serial killer trope. I read it one sitting because I could not let myself look away.

One of the things I love about pretty much every Stephen Graham Jones book I’ve read is his ability to take very ordinary moments and spin horror out of them. In this case, the ordinary moment is a simple practical joke between high school friends who have grown up together and know each other almost too well. Three of the teens decide to sneak a mannequin they’d found and played with as kids into the movie theatre their fourth friend works in and plan to use it to cause a ruckus. The attempted joke plays out in the first two chapters, so it’s not a spoiler to say things don’t go as planned and that the rest of the story builds off of what did or didn’t happen to the mannequin.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found department store mannequins creepy. As a kid, they seriously freaked me out in every store we walked into. I was convinced that when my parents’ attention was elsewhere, they would grab me. It didn’t help that I saw the Jon Pertwee Doctor fight the Autons on our local PBS affiliate when I was small. Even as an adult, finally seeing the Stephen Sondheim television musical “Evening Primrose” at the Museum of Television History in NYC, the idea of people being turned into mannequins gave me the shivers. So it’s no surprise that I read Night of the Mannequins expecting to be at least a little freaked out from the start. Jones did not disappoint. The mannequin in question, whom the teens creatively named ‘Manny’ when they were much younger and discovered ‘him’ and made him one summer’s plaything before abandoning him in our narrator’s garage, hit all the right notes for me from the moment he’s introduced. The featureless face, the easily disassembled-and-reassembled body, the pranks the kids played with him that one summer, and the way ‘Manny’ feels larger than life to the narrator all felt sufficiently eerie and set the tone for the rest of the novella.

In a tight 136 pages, Jones subverts or subtly plays with most of the tropes of the slasher-flick genre. We have a small group of teens who start the story doing something they shouldn’t be doing that will have repercussions they can’t foresee (except they’re not misbehaving at a summer camp or a party while parents are away, they’re pulling a practical joke in a mall movie theater). We have a “high” body-count (considering the number of teen characters we meet against the number still alive at the end of the story). We have a killer who might be supernatural or might be quite mundane (in fact we might have more than one killer running around). The killer manages to arrange at least one victim in a horrific tableau without leaving any forensic evidence behind to be tracked by. We have an impending natural disaster, as the threat of a tornado rears its head multiple times adding to the tension. And we have a “final boy” telling us the story in flashback (rather than a final girl, or so it seems).

Sawyer, our narrator and erstwhile “final boy,” is a wonderfully unreliable narrator. For most of the novella, we’re unsure who he’s telling this story to or even when he’s telling it. He sounds nervous, anxious. Some of the details he gives subtly contradict each other. We’re soon questioning if he’s seen what he thinks he’s seen, and if his part in the story is motivated by something other than fear of a mannequin that has come to life. I have to admit that partway through the story, I was wondering if ANY of it was really happening, or if it was all in Sawyer’s head … which lead of course to wondering where the story was going to go if I was correct.

I of course will not spoil in this review what the truth of the story is. I will say that Jones kept me wondering throughout the entire story and delivered a logical and satisfactory ending that still left some questions lingering (as any good first installment of a slasher flick would). The variety of death scenes also kept me on my toes and tense, even with the narrator telling us well in advance who was going to die next. Jones builds the dread and expectation in prose the way a movie would use music cues. He even works in the printed version of a movie “jump scare,” which I think is quite the feat.

Five stars and full marks for another great novella by Stephen Graham Jones. I anticipate this being on my reread list come October each year. It’s just that good.