Welcome to the Book Review Book Club! Every month, we select a book to discuss with our readers. Last month, we read “Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen. (You can also go back and listen to our episodes on “Wild Dark Shore,” “The Catch” and “Mrs. Dalloway.”)
It’s just about October, which means Halloween is around the corner. And that means it’s time to get spooky! Fortunately, we have a horror novel to help: “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” by Stephen Graham Jones.
The book is two things at once: a searching historical novel that examines America’s past sins and also a gory horror thriller about two feuding vampires.
It opens in 2012. While working in a dilapidated church parsonage, a construction worker finds a 100-year-old journal, written by a pastor named Arthur Beaucarne. The journal recounts a strange tale: In 1912, a mysterious Indigenous man, Good Stab of the Blackfeet tribe, walked into Arthur’s church and began to confess his life story. But Good Stab’s confession isn’t what Arthur expects. He shares a more harrowing and disturbing tale about how he was transformed into a vampire and sought revenge for the violence done unto his people.
In October, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.” We’ll be chatting about it on the Book Review podcast that airs on Oct. 31, and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by Oct. 23, and we may mention your observations in the episode.
Here’s some related reading to get you started.
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Our review of “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”: “What is Jones doing here, with this trifold narrative structure? He has created a novel that invites us to reflect on how the stories we tell about ourselves can be at once confessions and concealments. At the same time, he’s using this framework to set up some scary, big reveals.” Read the full review here.
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Our review of Stephen Graham Jones’s 2024 novel, “I Was a Teenage Slasher”: “In keeping with our current century’s predilection for turning monsters and boogeymen into misunderstood outcasts, Stephen Graham Jones’s viciously clever, over-the-top, genre-skewing new novel turns a gruesome murderer into ‘your friendly neighborhood slasher.’” Read the full review here.
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Paste Magazine’s interview with Stephen Graham Jones about writing “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”: “I never want vampirism to be like a superpower. I always want it to be a curse and I always want there to be a high price for it. That’s really important for me, and it’s really important that the creature has those clamps around it, such that it has to try to figure out how to live in a very tight, confined, rule-bound space.” Read the full interview here.
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Our interview with Stephen Graham Jones on the Book Review podcast, in which Jones recommends some of his favorite scary books. Listen to the full interview here.
We can’t wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
The post Book Club: Read ‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,’ by Stephen Graham Jones, with the Book Review appeared first on New York Times.
