Books Reading the Weird Letters That Eat Through the Paper: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 1) In 1912, a stranger comes to a Montana church to confess his crimes… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on February 18, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we begin our new longread with Chapters 1-2 of Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! 16 July 2012: Etsy Beaucarne is single, white, forty-two years old, and lives in a second floor apartment with her cat Taz. She teaches Communication and Journalism at the University of Wyoming, where she’s struggling towards tenure. Basically, it’s “get a book under contract, Etsy, and then we’ll talk.” Then a construction worker reaches into the wall of a Montana parsonage under renovation and pulls out a buckskin-wrapped “piece of history,” a journal written by her great-great-great grandfather, Arthur Beaucarne. Montana State in Bozeman has acquired the journal, which is in too fragile a condition to leave the conservators’ care. Its ink, homemade in the late 19th century, has aged into acid that eats away its brittle pages, causing the written letters to crumble at the least disturbance. Etsy has viewed it in person only once. Now she struggles to make out the faded script on digitized pages and printouts, but the labor could lead to that book contract and tenure. Her “greatest grandfather” was a fine writer, with “a documentarian’s eye” and “a playwright’s ear” that allowed him to “cut right to the center” of his era. Etsy illustrates the vivid on-scene history Arthur recorded by contrasting it with a contemporary newspaper account from March 26, 1912, the year Pastor Beaucarne disappeared from his Miles City, Montana, church. A mutilated corpse has melted out of the winter snows. Its semi-flayed condition recalls a streak of similar killings that occurred nearly four decades before. Can the Indians be “turning hostile again,” even though the government generously provides them with beef rations and land they leave fallow? Arthur Beaucarne’s journal entry is rich in personal detail and local color, with only a sprinkling of racism. Etsy hears a creak behind her and wonders if he has stepped from its pages to pray for her. But she doesn’t look around. Once you start looking every time you think you’re not alone, you never stop. March 31, 1912: Arthur writes that “the Indian gentleman” attended Sunday services once again. As before, he sits in an isolated pew at the back. He may be thirty or forty or much older, though there’s no silver in his black hair. That hair is too long to have been the product of a Jesuit school; nevertheless he wears a floor-length black clerical robe. He stands straight, shoulders back, attentive to Arthur’s every word, though Arthur speaks the German of his Lutheran parishioners. For some reason, Arthur feels as if the man is there to judge him. The first Sunday, the Indian left before Arthur could approach him, donning dark-lensed spectacles and scattering the stray dogs who beg on the church steps. The second Sunday, he remains in his pew after the congregation departs. When Arthur finally finds the courage to approach him, the Indian calls him “Three-Persons.” Father, Son, Creator, he explains. Arthur doesn’t correct his conception of the Holy Trinity as applying to its priest, himself. He learns that the Indian has an ocular illness that makes him hypersensitive to light; when he’s reduced the chapel candles to one, the man can remove his dark spectacles. Viewed up close, his eyes mesmerize Arthur—the irises and pupils merge in a solid inky black, and there is an “engorgement” in the “middlemost parts” that he’s only seen before in “the dead and eternally resting.” He has come to make his confession, the Indian says. After approximating the privacy of a Catholic confessional booth by sitting sideways on the pew in front of him, Arthur asks, “What do I call you?” As a youth, the Indian was called Weasel Plume. As a man, Good Stab. He was a member of the Small Robe band of the Amskapi Pikuni. Blackfeet. His people now call him Takes No Scalps or The Fullblood, but those aren’t so much names as what he does and is. He fasts every month, “in hopes Sun Chief will take [him] back. In hopes of walking among the Small Robes again, what of them are left.” Yet he walks alone. He doesn’t expect Arthur to believe his story at first, but he’ll return every Sunday until his confession’s told in full and his great crime revealed. “Such is the burden of the clergy,” Arthur thinks. “The burden and the gift.” Having known Montana since it was a territory, he has “comported with Indians” enough to know what to say next: “in ceremonial fashion, to invite [Good Stab] to begin with his story.” That is, “I listen with a good heart.” Good Stab looks up with “a joyful shine to his eyes,” and at Arthur’s nod, he commences. What’s Cyclopean: Arthur Beaucarne fills his journal with “phrenic peregrinations.” The Degenerate Dutch: There is much fear and dismissal of Native Americans in the early 20th century sections. Their hostility is so irrational given that we provide them with beef and crappy land, which they don’t even farm like civilized people. Libronomicon: My rare books friends tell me that you are not supposed to wear gloves while working with delicate material—the protection from skin oils isn’t worth the reduction in dexterity. Madness Takes Its Toll: Etsy’s father, she says, is in a “facility” in Denver and “not exactly compos mentis.” Ruthanna’s Commentary The Buffalo Hunter Hunter comes to me as a recommendation from Anne, and also much of the rest of the world. I pick it up expecting vampires and Native Americans and Stephen Graham Jones levels of gore, and knowing very little else. In the opening chapters, so far, I’m finding layers—worthy of peeling—that I’m all-too-tempted to metaphorize with the skinned corpse that also gets found. The top layer is Etsy Beaucarne. She’s a communications professor with an extension on her tenure clock—the lack of tenure due to the lack of publication, the extension presumably due to the difficulty of finding a replacement for her absurd teaching load. Her career is a disappointment to her scientist father, or was before he went senile. Her failure to publish seems also to be a failure to write; her great-etc-grandfather’s journal piques her passion in a way her own discipline doesn’t. Normally someone at this stage would at least be shopping around a ramped-up version of her dissertation—so what happened there? Like a lot of white people, Etsy’s disconnected from any more specific ethnic history. She imagines a French background based on her surname, but the journal provides a “lineage” that she’s previously lacked. Her father’s disapproval has left her with a shallow and unsatisfying foundation; her etc-grandfather gives her at least a “tradition” of journaling. Beaucarne means “beautiful meat.” Next layer: Pastor Arthur Beaucarne, Etsy’s ancestor and author of the journal. He’s a recovering-ish alcoholic, with past sins that involve skinned bodies and American Indians. He feels guilty; he thinks carefully and consciously about his social interactions; he’s casually racist in a way unfortunately typical of his culture. He loves huckleberry preserves. That last is probably not going to be plot-relevant, but you never know. The period racism is telling. Arthur’s guilt is prodded by Good Stab’s appearance in his church, but he’s also… paternalistic may be the best word. He can imagine Good Stab as a symbol because he imagine him as entirely a person. “The Indian gentleman” can be glossed as uneducated, running on instinctive skills, and a representative of a dying people. His tribe is a relic of the past, barely trickling into the 20th century. Arthur makes no mention of a wife, lover, or children, though any or all of those might lurk in his largely-unspoken past. Final layer so far: Good Stab, confessing to the pastor in the tradition of Interview With the Vampire. At least, I assume that he’s the vampire. He doesn’t seem pleased with the condition, and wishes to return to the favor of the sun so that he can walk with his people again. He takes no scalps, presumably in the same way that Dracula does not drink vine. And he must have a reason for coming to this particular pastor in this particular way, and not to one of his own people’s spiritual leaders. Still to come: the full story of the men who skinned the baby buffalos, and—if that even counts as hunting buffalo—the one who hunts the hunters in turn. Anne’s Commentary I knew I had to read The Buffalo Hunter Hunter because: One, VAMPIRES, my favorite monsters. Two, STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, one of my favorite writers. Three, SGJ writing about VAMPIRES. Four, SGJ writing about VAMPIRES in the American West of the 19th through the early 20th century, with a 21st century frame, which sounded like some tasty time-hopping. The three narrators also sounded like a toothsome combo: our link to the present day, stalled academic, Etsy Beaucarne; Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne, our first link to the past; and many-named Amskapi Pikuni vampire, Good Stab. I figured I couldn’t lose with this one. Then I read the first paragraph, and it was no longer a question of winning or losing on a normal scale. This opening struck me with the force of a “Call me Ishmael,” a “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream,” a “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” It reads: “A day worker reaches into the wall of a parsonage his crew’s revamping and pulls a piece of history up, the edges of its pages crumbling under the fingers of his glove, and I have to think that, if his supervisor isn’t walking by at just that moment, then this construction grunt stuffs that journal into his tool belt to pawn, or trade for beer, and the world never knows about it.” If you want to hook me, cast out a first sentence or paragraph (in this case, both) that describes finding a book or other artifact (but especially a book, double especially an aged manuscript.) Graham Jones adds an extra barb to his hook, and a horrifying one. What happens happens, absolute reality as Shirley Jackson puts it, but the history of what happened is fragile, mutable, liable to accidental loss or deliberate eradication. What if the construction grunt had shown Arthur Beaucarne’s journal to a pawnbroker who turned it down or tossed it with the other dubiously valuable secondhand books in a soggy, moldy box infested with book lice and silverfish? What if the grunt had traded it for beer to a beer trader who then spilled a whole can of Bud Light on it, no big loss to the spiller’s mind, except for the beer. Or what if the supervisor hadn’t seen the find as valuable enough to pass on, I suppose, to whoever owned the parsonage, and what if the owner didn’t appreciate it enough to set it on whatever fortunate path that brought it to Montana State University and proper curation? What if librarian Lydia hadn’t puzzled out the name of the journal-keeper and thought to search for other Beaucarnes, it being not an impossibly common surname? Etsy Beaucarne writes that she may owe the construction grunt her career. Actually, she owes her career to a whole chain of people stretching back to the grunt and beyond him, to Arthur Beaucarne, who hid his journal in a dry enough wallspace to keep it from total ruin. And to Good Stab himself, without whom Arthur might have had nothing more compelling to write about than Mrs. Grandlin’s German bread and chunky huckleberry jam. Not that Arthur didn’t make that bread and jam sound delicious. In another time and place, he would have made a fine food writer. I can’t help but think Arthur would have been a happier man if he’d had nothing to chronicle but the pantry contributions of his parishioners, the heckling and porch gossip of the tragicomic lodging house boarders, and his mea culpas concerning the communion wine and other furtive libations. On the other hand, such scanty comforts can offer still scantier intellectual stimulation, and scantiest of all, any chance of redemption. At the least, Good Stab’s out-of-nowhere church attendance offers up a seemingly benign mystery for Arthur to ponder. What could the Indian gentleman want from a Lutheran service, particularly one delivered in a white-man’s language even less comprehensible than English? If he hoped for a meal, the communion wafer was all Arthur could offer before he left the church. But Arthur doesn’t really think the Indian gentleman was after a handout. And why, by the way, does Arthur think of this Indian as a “gentleman”? He himself writes that his journal entry is probably “the first time one of [Good Stab’s] race has been referred to as such in ink.” His flock view this “relic” of bad times with nervousness and antipathy. There is the physical dignity of Good Stab’s squared shoulders and straight spine. There is his command of English, much greater than the expected crude ability to “accomplish simple commerce.” There is Arthur’s disquieting sense that Good Stab is “there to judge him.” Yet Good Stab says he has come to the church to confess, which implies that he’s seeking formal forgiveness for his sins. Yet the title of this entry in Arthur’s journal is “The Absolution of Three-Persons.” I doubt that Arthur gave the entry this title. I’d attribute it to his eventual transcriber, Etsy, or extra-narratively, to Graham Jones. In any case, the reader is faced with the question of why Arthur, whom Good Stab calls Three-Persons, is the one being absolved when it’s Good Stab who is making the confession. The answer may lie in Arthur’s observation-to-self that hearing a confession, however protracted, is “the burden of the clergy.” No, wait. “The burden and the gift.” The “gift” part could refer to the confessor’s professional ability to forgive sins. Or, as implied in the Lord’s Prayer, in forgiving the trespasses of others, one is also worthy of forgiveness. Etsy has had her first turn at narration. So has Arthur. Next time, we’ll get Good Stab’s. I anticipate a twisted, probably heartbreaking ride. Next week, join us for a mysterious disappearance and flat-pack furniture in David Erik Nelson’s “The Nölmyna”.[end-mark] The post Letters That Eat Through the Paper: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 1) appeared first on Reactor.