GSWS Feminist Book Club - August 2026
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Stephen Graham Jones
Simon and Schuster (2025)
The group appreciated how Stephen Graham Jones revived literary vampire horror through his Blackfeet lens to reckon with the genocidal foundations American nation building. However, we found The Buffalo Hunter Hunter鈥�s dual structure contentious.
The bulk of the novel takes the form of a found diary of the conversations between Henry Beaucarne, a Lutheran minister stationed in the early twentieth Dakotas, and Good Stab a Blackfoot man and the eponymous Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Appearing one day in the back of Beaucarne鈥檚 church, Good Stab unravels the minister through their conversations, while his supernatural nature allows him to exact a premeditated campaign of vengeance against local settlers. The novel culminates with Beaucarne finally confessing before a congregation of Good Stab鈥檚 prey to his role in the Marias Massacre, the United States Army鈥檚 mass murder of an unarmed Blackfeet camp decades prior.
Book-ending the diary are the present observations of Etsy Beaucarne, ostensibly the last surviving member of her family and a tenuously employed academic. While her arc promises a reckoning with her family鈥檚 generational culpability, the novel ends with her bitterly washing her literally bloody hands of the past. The group felt that her presence only served to critique Americans鈥� refusal to 鈥渓isten with a good heart,鈥� rather than fully engage with academia鈥檚 ongoing complicity in perpetuating colonialism.
Rating: 3.5