Books Smoke and Mirrors: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 9) Could tobacco make one’s blood toxic to a vampire? By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on June 10, 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 cover Chapters 17-18 of Stephen Graham Jones’ Nebula AND Stoker Award winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Absolution of Three-Persons, April 28, 1912. Good Stab’s come and gone, and Arthur’s still alive. He believes it’s because he’s been smoking Chesterfield cigarettes. Once tobacco made long trudges through the snow tolerable. Now it lets him “relax into himself for the first time in days.” Their very mass-produced regularity comforts him by suggesting “a modern world where order reigned supreme… advancing steadily and implacably forward, to bring civilization to the savage wilds.” Also, he hopes tobacco residue will make his blood toxic to his tormentor. The Chesterfields can ward against Good Stab’s teeth, if not against “his corrupt and corrupting presence.” That presence makes itself known as Arthur smokes in a pew. He looks up to see that the wooden effigy of Jesus is gone from the over-altar crucifix; Good Stab hangs there instead. He descends in terrifying silence, then extinguishes all the candles except one, which he gives to Arthur. They resume their usual pews and verbal sparring, while outside the town strays devour food lefty by parishioners for their ailing pastor. Good Stab says he’s decapitated Jesus and left his head in a horse trough. The head later appears on the church steps, presumably returned by boys fearful of being accused of the desecration. Good Stab thanks Arthur for sending Sheriff Doyle to the grasslands for easy slaughter. Arthur, who’s been dealing his adversary jabs he half-expects will goad his own death, finally asks Good Stab to take him rather than further victims. Good Stab declines. With the desperation of He who asked “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” Arthur asks, “Why are you here?” The answer: “Because you remember too, though you pretend it never happened.” Good Stab has come to remind him. When Arthur says please do, he mocks, “You listen with a good heart?” Arthur tells Good Stab, “I listen with the only one I have.” The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel, April 28, 1912. It took two winters for Good Stab to recover from smoking with his father. It would have taken even longer if Wolf Calf hadn’t carried him to Napi’s dugout and left him in the god’s care. Napi tells him endless stories to carry him through his “long cold fever.” Through clever switching between the Pikuni and napikwan languages, Napi also schools Good Stab in English. He’ll need it to navigate napikwan towns and find Arthur. All the way up in the Backbone, Napi felt what Arthur had done, and it made him cry. Arthur has wondered if Good Stab can die. Yes, as simply as by eating nothing but “dirty-faces,” mice, until he became just a big dirty-face himself, forgetting all he used to be. However desirable such oblivion, Good Stab’s declined it. He had to wait for Arthur to return to Pikuni territory, and so Napi fed Good Stab through those two winters on his own blood. He feeds him once more before pushing him away and into dreams of his first death at the hands of napikwan soldiers. It has taken Good Stab years to fully remember his two winters with Napi. Now he carries all of Napi’s stories with him, their sole keeper until he dies for good. He doesn’t like carrying the Cat Man inside him, but if it means he lives long enough to see the Pikuni vindicated, he’ll endure it. Good Stab gives a brief history of his travels between Napi’s dugout and his meeting with Arthur. He encounters a band of “Rabbit Men” in search of “black sky iron” that will bring back their dead. He continues to keep safe the white buffalo Weasel Plume and his increasing herd, and to feed (not infrequently enough) on other Pikuni. He comes across Pikuni who now hunt buffalo just for their tradeable hides. He can judge, yet not judge them, given his own crimes of survival. He follows a raven, the spirit animal of the Pikuni boy he rescued. It leads him to the Fat Melters’ camp, where a young nightrider (horse herd guardian) named Yellow Kidney tells him what he witnessed of the Marias River massacre, and how it was started by a napikwan scout shooting Heavy River as he showed his “papers.” But the boy doesn’t know this scout’s name. He does know that Good Stab is The Fullblood, because Happy talks about him. Happy is his rescued “raven boy,” now a medicine man. At night, when Yellow Kidney guards his herd, Good Stab visits the boy’s lodge. He discovers his sister is comatose from a head injury. Before morning, after basking in the warmth of the sleeping family and grieving for the girl, he drinks her. When he leaves, he’s ambushed by the “Rabbit Men,” seeking vengeance for the one he killed earlier. They leave him as dead as he can be. As he’s recovering, Happy finds him. He says that Wolf Calf is still alive and the oldest Pikuni left. What should Happy tell him? That his son is dead, Good Stab says. A year passes before Good Stab returns to the Fat Melters’ camp, again led by Happy’s raven. He leaves an antelope for Yellow Kidney’s mother, then hides, waiting for Yellow Kidney to return from nightriding. Instead, he sees the mother send men out to look for her boy. The men spot and pursue Good Stab, but he finds Yellow Kidney first, dead, his neck bitten as Good Stab had bitten his sister’s, but Good Stab didn’t kill him! Then he sees that the boy lies on the robe of a white buffalo, freshly skinned. Good Stab runs, and has been running ever since. He would now tell the pastor his pipe is empty, but Arthur must realize it’s been empty for half of Good Stab’s life. If life is what one could call his existence. What’s Cyclopean: Learning English “burned inside at first, but then, like bees coming back to their nest, each one found its little hole to sleep in, that it fit in”. Good Stab hopes that Pikuni words will sting Arthur “the whole way in”. The Degenerate Dutch: The same acumen that might be an “admirable trait” in a writer (like Arthur with his journal) is merely cruelty in “a savage with nefarious intent.” Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: Arthur tries to send Sheriff Doyle after Good Stab, with unfortunate results for the sheriff—Arthur’s guilt for that is at least partly earned. Gluttony is at a wane this week, with parishioner offerings left on the stoop for the dogs. Anne’s Commentary Anyone conversant with Buffy the Vampire Slayer will know that tobacco is not an effective vampire repellant; Spike is rarely without a cig in hand, if only to reinforce his bad-boy image. Nor does traditional vampire folklore recommend the herb as a deterrent. Never mind—there are excellent reasons why Graham Jones selects tobacco as the garlic of his Blackfeet vampires. When Arthur (puffing away on his Chesterfield) asks Good Stab if he misses smoking, Good Stab must nod “reluctantly, perhaps bitterly.” “All things that made me Pikuni are like that now,” he says, waving away secondhand smoke. Not that it’s a coffin nail from Arthur’s pack he craves. What Arthur clutches as a comforting manifestation of the white man’s increasingly industrialized and homogeneous society, a shield against savagery, Good Stab may well find an anathema. In a windspeaker.com article, Mel Ironshirt of the Kainai Nation points out that: “The Blackfoot people can trace tobacco use back to 1200 A.D. and it was always used as an offering to our Creator. One Elder mentioned that if you light up a cigarette bought in a store the smoke doesn’t go up straight. It tends to linger down where our children are playing. When you light our tobacco for sacred or ceremonial use, the smoke takes our message and our prayers to the heavens where we can be heard.” So seriously did the Blackfeet Nation take the distinction between commercial (recreational) tobacco products and ceremonial tobacco that it put into law the Blackfeet Tobacco Free Act. Its Preamble dedicates the ordinance to “all the Blackfeet members who have died and suffer from commercial tobacco related cancers and diseases.” Below, it’s clarified that: “Blackfeet cultural, spiritual and ceremonial use of tobacco is an inherent immutable component of the Blackfeet Cultural Landscape. The Blackfeet Tobacco Free Act does not ban, prohibit or restrict in any manner the traditional, cultural, spiritual, and ceremonial sacred tobacco use by the Blackfeet People.” Good Stab would indeed smoke his tobacco with a difference, except he can’t. It’s one more link to his people the Cat Man has severed. What remains is a drive to maintain the appearance of being Pikuni, sustainable only by preying on Pikunis. That’s a blood tie fatal for one kinsperson and deeply corrupting for the other. The dialogue between Arthur and Good Stab has grown more fraught with each meeting in those two back pews. In Chapter 17, the charade that one is the confessor and the other the supplicant, the normal sacramental situation, has broken down. A Christian priest or pastor isn’t supposed to be faultless, above confession; as Romans 3:23 puts it, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Good Stab fills his “gospel” with graphic descriptions of his many revenge killings and fatal feedings. He revels in some, while suffering intense remorse for others. Arthur writes at tedious length about his bouts of gluttony; his big sin he dodges, even though he’s battered more and more with the conviction that Good Stab knows what his maxima culpa is, and Good Stab knows that Arthur knows he knows it. When Good Stab pointedly thanks Arthur for sending Doyle out into the grasslands, an easy victim, Arthur can admit he feels guilty about that, while in his next sentence implying that Good Stab’s desecration of the church crucifix was a worse crime. A couple pages later, he even claims that his was an “unwitting complicity in such an abhorrent act.” Who really wants, or needs, to be absolved here? How many people has Good Stab killed, Arthur challenges. Good Stab will give him the count when it’s done. Arthur assumes that will be when he himself is among that number. The question of absolution, for pastor or monster or both, may be decided when Good Stab can compare his headcount with that of the Pikuni dead in Heavy Runner’s Bear Creek camp. Ruthanna’s Commentary Traditionally, vampires are held back by the things they valued in life. Crosses, for example, or garlic—in Eastern Europe, where garlic seasons everything and might well be the source of life. Good Stab is sensitive to tobacco, which is sacred to his people. But it’s also a substance appropriated and turned into a secular addiction by napikwan. Arthur thinks of his cigarettes like “soldiers in a column, advancing steadily and implacably forward, to bring civilization to the savages wilds.” Empire, like cigarettes, is toxic and addictive. So stuff that once helped make Good Stab Pikuni, has been warped to make Arthur napikwan. He thinks of them as a ward against the nachzehrer, and they seem to have at least some effect even when Good Stab doesn’t inhale. This isn’t the only place where they “play” tug-of-war with each other’s beloved symbols. Good Stab hides—and replaces—the wooden Christ from the front of the church. Does he also think of himself as offering a “dark gospel,” or is this just another coup to count? Good Stab also pulls down an American flag, the thing that “flies above every camp of dead Indians.” But it’s the buffalo, central to both napikwan and Pikuni understanding of what it means to be Indian, at the center of this battle. That battle is now much more open: Arthur and Good Stab acknowledge their mutual hostility, both trying to count coup. Arthur notices that Good Stab’s braids aren’t those appropriate to the Blackfeet, but amid their back-and-forth doesn’t bring that up. Would it tell too much, that he knows? Instead, he spouts dramatic but ineffective lines about the “secular nature” of Happy’s spiritual awakening. Does that challenge Good Stab’s faith? Why should it, when he already ties his own existence to the spiritual and sacred? Arthur may recognize Pikuni hairstyles, but doesn’t get a worldview in which “secular” isn’t a separate category. That worldview’s emphasized in this week’s “gospel,” where Napi rescues Good Stab from his supernatural asthma attack and nurses him through two years of recovery. The spirit’s generosity has limits, but they’re broad. Along with sharing His blood that doesn’t run out, Napi also teaches His patient English. Good Stab has clearly picked up not only the language but the method: his confession plays that same trick of inserting more and more of Pikuni terminology as he goes along, informing both Arthur and the reader. Useful for the reader, disturbing for Arthur. Arthur fears getting eaten, but it seems there are other things he fears at least as much. Guilt that can’t be expunged. Remembering… what? Good Stab assures us that there’s something, “though you pretend it never happened.” How much of Arthur’s wittering about cake hides deeper complicities? “Oh, to be so young and easily punished again,” he thinks wistfully. But Good Stab is right there, punishing easily—perhaps what he misses is being easily done with punishment, and done with thinking about the deed that earned it. Arthur’s not the only one who makes excuses, though. Good Stab’s desperation to remain Pikuni brings him from consuming a dying elder, to a lost man with a broken leg (a real-bear will eat him anyway), to another banished by his band (if he lives, he’ll be scared without his people), to someone who’s perfectly fine (Good Stab dresses like a Crow, so his prey will be proud to die fighting an enemy). It’s surprisingly reminiscent of Arthur’s explanations when faced with a nice casserole. The two of them, uncomfortably, have a lot in common. How much, and exactly what… those are questions to be answered in a future week. And which Arthur, in particular, would rather not address. The reader, on the other hand, is increasingly eager to find out what the hell is going on. Next week, we continue our Stoker-awarded enjoyment with a selection from Kristy Park Kulski’s Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora: Avida Shonibar’s “An Unholy Terroir.”[end-mark] The post Smoke and Mirrors: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 9) appeared first on Reactor.