The buffalo on the cover is not distant or noble. It’s cropped tight, unsentimental. You can see the wiry fur curling round its eye, the cracked horn, a hint of snow or ice, before reaching the dark wet of the nostril. The title is stamped over its face in tall, official lettering—The Buffalo Hunter—but someone has come back over it, in red ink, and written Hunter again, like a correction or a protest. Or a signature in blood. The pages are dyed that same red, and by the time you’re halfway through, it begins to feel less like a stylistic flourish than a warning: you’re holding something that bleeds.
This is the first Stephen Graham Jones novel I’ve read. I picked it up the way we all pick up books now—through a blur of algorithm and marketing copy. But what caught me was the cover, and the promise of a journal found behind a wall. I assumed it would be horror, and it is. But not in the usual sense. There’s no creature, no exorcism, no pattern of bodies that only the heroine can decipher. What there is, instead, is a Blackfeet man in a black clerical robe, who walks into a white Lutheran church in 1912, sits at the back, and waits to confess.
The Buffalo Hunter is a horror novel about confession. Not in the Catholic sense, though it flirts with that architecture, but in the American sense: the endless liberal fantasy that the crimes of the past can be narrated, archived, and thereby absolved. A journal is discovered. A descendant begins to transcribe it. The ghosts arrive on schedule. But the horror isn’t in the ghost. The horror is in the transcription.
Witnessing
The descendant is Etsy Beaucarne, a precariously employed Communications lecturer whose tenure hopes now hang on turning this dusty manuscript, her great-great-great-grandfather’s journal, into a book. The original is too fragile to touch. She reads it on a laptop, breathes carefully, prints out the scanned pages on card stock from the university supply cupboard. Her cat is named Taz. She lives alone above students she teaches. She hopes the dead man’s words will save her job. This, I think, is where the novel is at its most chilling: not in the skinless corpse found in the Montana grass, but in Etsy’s quiet calculation that a family archive might make her legible to the neoliberal university.
Her ancestor, Arthur Beaucarne, is a Lutheran pastor in 1912 Montana. He is also lonely, insecure, and yearning. The journal begins as a kind of frontier diary—long digressions about jam, the weather, the indignities of parish life—but it tightens when The Fullblood arrives. The Fullblood is not there to frighten. He is not spectral. He is precise, quiet, and deeply disconcerting. Beaucarne cannot stop looking at him. He wonders if he will catch a pebble mid-sermon. He thinks, in one terrifyingly tender passage, about wanting to be held close in the man’s medicine pouch. He has no idea what he is confessing.
There are entries in the journal that read like gothic ethnography. But they’re also war reports. The Fullblood speaks of buffalo slaughtered, of smallpox, of a woman struck with the flat of a sabre, of children starved and buried. And of the massacre that left 217 dead, “and not just dead,” he says, “but counted, like animals.” The word massacre appears sparingly, as if even he knows that repetition drains it of force.
“There are entries in the journal that read like gothic ethnography. But they’re also war reports.”
He’s referring to the Marias Massacre of 1870, when the U.S. Cavalry under Major Eugene Baker attacked a Piegan Blackfeet camp on the Marias River in Montana. Most of the dead were women, children, the elderly. It’s the kind of event American history names, but doesn’t dwell on. Jones doesn’t present it as a teaching moment. It’s not there for balance or historical colour. It sits cold and unredeemed, because the Fullblood survived it, or says he did. Either way, it happened. The number—217—is spoken like a bureaucratic incantation. Counted, like animals. Entered, presumably, into a ledger. History’s version of mercy.
He tells us he is nearly eighty winters old but has the posture of a younger man. He speaks of wolves, of skinwalkers, of the “Nachzehrer’s dark gospel.” He speaks like someone who has told this story before, and has never been believed.
And Etsy, the 2012 voice, reads it all. She finds herself murmuring his name aloud. She begins to sense movement behind her in the flat. She hears the floorboards creak. She starts to feel that Arthur isn’t gone. Or perhaps that Arthur brought something with him.
But what haunts this novel isn’t a man, or even a spirit. It’s the archive. The digitised pages, the special gloves, the committee meetings, the hope that this will all amount to a monograph. The horror here is clerical, procedural. Etsy wears the same mask and booties her chemist father wore to handle acids and alkalis, but instead she is handling blood. Her terror isn’t that the Fullblood will reappear. Her terror is that the book won’t sell.
“But what haunts this novel isn’t a man, or even a spirit. It’s the archive.”
Beaucarne calls him “the Indian gentleman,” though not always. Sometimes he slips, into anthropology, into missionary paternalism, into veiled eroticism. The Fullblood unsettles him precisely because he cannot be assimilated. He wears a Jesuit robe but is not Christian. He uses Christian language but rearranges it: Father, Son, Creator. He asks to confess, but refuses the form of confession. “What I wish is to confess, Three-Persons,” he said at last … “You don’t have a box we can sit in?” the Indian gentleman asked then … He held his hands out in a plane between us, fingers spread … I knew he’d seen the latticework Catholic confessionals have.” He arrives every Sunday and sits at the back, saying nothing. He eats only one wafer at communion. Beaucarne watches him, longs to know his purpose, imagines violence, imagines grace, imagines being judged. He is desperate to place him, historically, spiritually, grammatically.
It’s in this failure to contain The Fullblood that Jones’s horror begins to hum. There are very few raised voices in The Buffalo Hunter, no scenes of possession or murder relayed directly. The violence is elsewhere, offstage, historical, repressed. But like any good gothic writer, Jones knows that repression is where horror lives. Beaucarne is the archetypal haunted man of letters: alone with his candle and his conscience, scrawling long entries into the dark, hoping that narration might exorcise something. But what if it doesn’t?
The Fullblood speaks in a language that resists the archive. His memories stretch across battles, treaties, massacres, dreams. He tells us how the buffalo died, how the soldiers came, how the people were renamed and reclassified. “This is what I wanted to tell the Indian down there, because I needed him to know that this could be over between me and him now … Maybe that head tumbling down … told Good Stab what I need him to know.” The implication is chilling: closure, for the pastor, means silencing the story. He speaks in image and story: “the big-mouth who wants for water but barks at it instead of drinking,” “the cards I keep inside,” “the coldmaker.” These aren’t metaphors to be unpacked; they’re forms of memory that refuse to be reduced to data. It’s no accident that Beaucarne, the pastor, wants to pin it all down. That’s his horror: that meaning might remain fugitive, something that can’t be catalogued, cited, or turned into a lecture slide.
Extraction
Etsy inherits that same impulse. She wants to do better, to honour her ancestor and the journal, to get it right. But her reading is also extractive. She’s anxious about publication, about framing, about which department will claim her work. “Are any of the scholars from those programmes related to the subject?” she asks, without irony. “That’s my hook, I’m fairly certain. That’s the thing that’s going to get this junior professor a book under contract, and position her on campus for a long and comfortable career.” Jones is unsparing here: Etsy is a sympathetic character, but she is still part of the machine. The Fullblood’s stories pass through her like the land passed into the hands of settlers, named, charted, but never understood.
If the novel has a monster, it is not the Nachzehrer of the journal’s chapter headings. It is the logic of whiteness: that stories can be confessed, written down, processed, and then placed behind glass. It’s no coincidence that the university special collections room—temperature-controlled, dustless, hushed—is described in the same register Beaucarne uses for his church. This is where white guilt goes to ritualise itself. And like any good ritual, the point is not transformation but continuity. It lets you keep going. It lets you keep reading.
Jones doesn’t offer a catharsis. There’s no climactic scene in which the past is confronted, no final act of reconciliation. What he gives us instead is recursion. The Fullblood’s story has already happened. The buffalo are already dead. The manuscript has already been found. Etsy already knows how the journal ends, and she reads it anyway, hoping it might end differently this time. It doesn’t.
There is a kind of genius in how Jones uses the form of the novel against itself. Epistolary horror has always depended on the conceit that what you’re reading is real, and that it has somehow survived. Here, that survival is the horror. Etsy destroys the journal in the end, printing it on university cardstock and allowing the originals to fade: “without anything physical, they’re just Photoshop curiosities now.” The journal wasn’t meant to be read. The dead don’t want to be interpreted. But the neoliberal university, like the Lutheran church before it, exists to interpret the dead—to file them, cite them, use them.
The prairie dog in Etsy’s hallway—alive, staring, out of place—is not a punchline. It is the novel’s final image of return. A creature dragged in from the grasslands, made domesticated, briefly, before vanishing again. It reminds her of something. She clutches a cushion to her chest. She calls for her cat. She doesn’t look behind her.
And why would she? There’s no need to look behind when the thing that’s stalking you is not supernatural but structural: capital, whiteness, the university, the state. Jones’s horror doesn’t lurk in the shadows—it files your paperwork, praises your scholarship, cites your sources. The Fullblood’s story doesn’t haunt because it’s unfinished. It haunts because it’s been finished, repeatedly, by others. This is the final horror: that the settler-colonial project needs its ghosts. Needs them to teach. Needs them to publish. Needs them to justify its own survival.
“There’s no need to look behind when the thing that’s stalking you is not supernatural but structural: capital, whiteness, the university, the state. Jones’s horror doesn’t lurk in the shadows—it files your paperwork, praises your scholarship, cites your sources.”
Form
Jones weaponises form. The novel mimics the machinery of institutional literature, the found journal, the academic discovery, the woman alone with her laptop making sense of male history, but turns each of these into a site of unease. Etsy’s frame narrative doesn’t bring clarity; it introduces contamination. The journal doesn’t reveal truth; it repeats violence. The genre structure itself collapses: horror without a monster, a mystery without resolution, a confession that confesses nothing. This is not metafiction in the postmodern sense, but a kind of anti-formalism: a refusal to grant the reader the usual rewards. What if narrative isn’t redemptive? What if the very act of structuring experience—through diary, novel, archive—is itself complicit? The Buffalo Hunter doesn’t just tell a story about colonial aftermath. It shows how storytelling is part of the aftermath.
At a time when universities are scrambling to “decolonise the curriculum” and doing so now under the renewed pressure of Trump’s second presidency, with federal funding threatened and accusations of ideological activism levelled at institutions like Harvard and Princeton, Jones’s novel offers a sobering counterpoint. It suggests that the university’s desire to reckon with its own complicity, through inclusion, through citation, through careful footnoting of pain, is often just another way to manage the unmanageable. The political climate may now force some to abandon even these gestures, but the novel reminds us that The half-measures were never enough. They were always just a way to keep the institution intact. That isn’t to say all decolonisation efforts are hollow, but that the ones which proceed without risk or rupture are. What Jones makes clear is that genuine reckoning would mean surrendering control over the story. Letting it end differently. Or not ending it at all.
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