Books Reading the Weird Dueling Metaphors: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 10) After weeks of projected guilt and petty sins, we’re finally through to the real confession… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on June 24, 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 19-20 of Stephen Graham Jones’ Nebula- and Stoker-winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Absolution of Three-Persons, May 1, 1912. Good Stab knows who Arthur is, and that Arthur knows he knows, and yet their bizarre Sunday co-confessionals continue. Unable to take any more of “the farce,” Arthur coats his log with sacramental wafers and wine to hide it from the keen-nosed Good Stab, and prepares to get the hell out of Miles City. What Good Stab doesn’t understand, Arthur thinks, is that Arthur’s a different man from the one who committed the crime for which the Pikuni seeks justice. Meanwhile Arthur still wavers between belief in Good Stab’s supernatural nature and denying that there’s “any tangible proof.” He hopes that Good Stab will take his disappearance as an admission of guilt and not “make [Miles City] pay for [Arthur’s] trespasses.” Arthur won’t disclose his destination. Suffice it to write he doesn’t expect to return, or even to survive the journey. He’s old and infirm. He must travel on foot, with meager supplies. But God never said absolution would be easy, and that’s “the only repast” he now seeks. The Absolution of Three-Persons, May 12, 1912. It’s been eleven days since Arthur’s last entry. His parishioners beat on the door of the church, but he doesn’t dare open it lest someone see the state of the chapel. He has barricaded the entryway with pews, and blacked out the windows with an inky paste made from the dampened pages of Bibles. He’s ventured to the rectory only to retrieve his log; God no longer hears him, so it’s his only confidant. Even Cordelia the cat has abandoned him. She can smell what’s transpired in the church. Those eleven days ago, Arthur walked “under cover of a starless night,” alone, northward into the open prairie. The next night he crossed the Yellowstone River, then built a fire to dry his clothes and ward off evil prowlers. Waking from a doze, he saw a pale, naked form sitting across the fire. It was the headless wooden body of his church’s formerly crucified Jesus. Good Stab had accompanied the figure, having traced Arthur by his smell. He tilted the statue into the fire. Hollow, it burned quickly. After remarking that they sat almost where his first skinned victims were found, he said he hadn’t finished his confession. No, Three-Persons couldn’t hear him out on the prairie. They must return to his “holy house,” where they started. He then rushed at Arthur and clamped the flat edges of his teeth around his throat, not to bite but to cut off circulation to his brain. As Arthur’s vision darkened, he saw stars “scratching lines” across the sky and knew he was being born anew. He woke two days later and found himself suspended above his own chapel, with a Jesus-eye view of the place, for Good Stab had bound him to the vacant crucifix. Good Stab stood below, and for the first time, he addressed the pastor as “Arthur Beaucarne.” He then proceeded to introduce Arthur to his new “congregation”—the variously decomposed corpses carefully propped up in the pews. In attendance were Sheriff Doyle, his star of office pinned through one eye; postmaster Livinius Clarkson, wrapped in his beloved American flag; the four lodging house porch-sitters. Behind them were arrayed the town’s stray dogs, lids skinned to permanently expose their dead eyes. A candle started Clarkson slowly grilling, providing unwelcome illumination of another corpse: the flayed “hump” at whose burial Arthur had presided. Arthur sobbed, pleaded “Why?” For the first time, Good Stab betrayed excitement, and Arthur realized that they were both “mired in up to our souls [in] the culmination of all [Good Stab’s] devious efforts,” his turnip-skin peeling of Arthur down to the “white meat.” Arthur recognized the “hump” as Benjamin Flowers, the man from San Francisco whom Doyle had identified. Flowers’ three sons were propped up beside him; the youngest and most recently flayed was Arthur Flowers. Cryptically, Good Stab asked if he was named after the pastor. Then he turned the subject to the massacre at Heavy Runner’s camp. Arthur arrived with other soldiers after walking four days in a blizzard; already three of his toes had blackened in his boot. His orders were to “strike them [the Blackfeet] hard.” He obeyed, killing sick elders, women and children. Nor was it the scout Joe Cobell who started the slaughter by shooting Heavy Runner, was it? Having held in too much, for too long, Arthur screamed, as he should have screamed for the soldiers to stop shooting. Good Stab screamed, too. This was the story of America, Arthur thought, told in a forgotten church to a mute choir of the dead. Voice recovered, Arthur made excuses: He followed orders, he was exhausted, the Blackfeet didn’t even fight back, another regiment would have done the same. Good Stab finally pried out the truth, that Arthur could kill the people “because you were just Indians!” And the men of the Flowers family were just napikwans, Good Stab countered. But they were more to Arthur. After Heavy Runner’s camp, Arthur consoled himself with a fort woman named Ava. Benjamin was the son Arthur never knew of, Benjamin’s sons Arthur’s grandsons. Good Stab had killed them because all of Arthur’s blood had to be spilled. To Arthur’s anguished “When will it be enough,” he demands, “When will napikwans have enough of our land?” Still bound to the cross, his heart finally on the ground as Good Stab wants it, Arthur hears his last confession, which includes his confrontation with the finally revived and potent Cat Man, who, it turns out, killed Good Stab’s white buffalo Weasel Plume and the boy Yellow Kidney. What’s Cyclopean: We’re not going to say the “two corrupt syllables” of Good Stab’s kind’s common name. “Nachzehrer” better “captures the monster they would signify.” Vampire. Vampire. Vampire, vampire, vampire! The Degenerate Dutch: “Perhaps” all Indians are “monstrous… mind and heart spawned from the most sinful part of the Pit.” In which case, killing them is no “trespass,” right? Right??? Libronomicon: Bibles are used this week to make a sacrilegious paste for blacking out church windows, and as “medicine” to commemorate the killing of a particularly obnoxious missionary. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: Arthur’s drinking is finally connected to his older, murderous sins against Heavy Runner’s camp. Ruthanna’s Commentary We’ve been waiting, through weeks of confession, for the real confession. It’s been obvious that Arthur is hiding things not only from the world, but from himself. He’s dropped hints, projected his guilt on others, redirected to petty sins, and insisted that he’s been reborn and doesn’t need to think about all those things that other guy did. This week, Good Stab forces it out into the open: Arthur led the massacre Heavy Runner’s camp. His admission is a mix of self-justification and self-flagellation. He was following orders, they didn’t fight back, manifest destiny made their deaths inevitable, they were just Indians. But also he should have stopped it, he’s felt guilty all this time, he’s a different person, he tried to fuck and then drink and then preach the memories away—doesn’t it matter that contributing to genocide is traumatic? It does, and it doesn’t. It matters because when we stop caring about the lives and well-beings of others, we stop caring about our own humanity too. And it doesn’t because Arthur’s alcoholism and dissociation don’t bring back the dead. And it does because his self-protective justifications then justify further horrors. And it doesn’t because he shouldn’t get to make the massacre a story about himself. I’ve just been listening to the If Books Could Kill episode about The Body Keeps the Score. It’s a book about trauma that a lot of people have found helpful, and which apparently has a lot of scientific and moral problems. It offers single-minded sympathy for people traumatized by their own roles in atrocity—a sympathy that’s interested in finding them “peace” but not atonement or justice, to the degree that either are possible. One that’s not at all interested in those whose lives they’ve destroyed, the further traumas that they’ve left in their wakes. This seems very much like what Arthur wants. What he thinks, at least sometimes, that his reinvention as a cleric should earn. Good Stab is trauma that he’s left in his wake, a body very literally keeping score. (There’s that count he keeps promising.) He in turn—no longer Pikuni—continues atrocity. Justice in the “eye for an eye” sense, but not in the sense that changes anything, or that makes a better world. Good Stab is a metaphor as well as a real bloody-minded vampire, but Arthur is also a metaphor. Or he wants to be – it’s another way that he justifies himself. He was merely part of the force of America fighting to be born. “You can’t stop a country from happening.” As if there were no other ways for countries to happen. As if the “pioneers” weren’t trying to stop already-existent nations from happening. He was the “different breed of men” needed to “forge a new land, a better country, one that made use of its resources rather than letting them lie fallow.” Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery insist that only European extraction counts as a meaningful relationship. They also insist on themselves as forces of nature. You can’t be blamed for implementing the inevitable. Where there’s no alternative, there’s no guilt. At 70% through the book, we can’t be entirely done with reveals. Good Stab has more to say. And there are the ongoing parallels between the two men—made more parallel by Arthur’s insistence that he, too, has died and become someone new. It’s an odd insistence. It makes sense for Good Stab, who thinks of his original self and soul as collectively supported—there’s a real and consistent definition of “dead” there, even as he walks and talks and feeds. “Reborn in Christ” doesn’t usually imply death, but soul-cleansing. Arthur seems to want to have it both ways. “Who you claim to see inside me is long dead.” At the same time, he yearns for ostensibly-already-experienced absolution. But no. Jesus may forgive all; Good Stab has other ideas. Anne’s Commentary At present, I can’t find that any studio or network has officially signed to make a limited series of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, but considering the success of the novel and of films like Sinners, I have strong hopes for it. If anything can outdo Game of Throne’s Red Wedding, it would be the Redder, Deader confession scene in this week’s reading. Make-up F/X artists would be drooling to get their hands on the corpses. I don’t know about the dogs, however. Caninophiles might balk at all those dead and lidless pups blasting the screen with “their hungry, childlike gaze.” If any of us doubted that Good Stab is a Villain whose “mind and heart [were] spawned from the most sinful part of the Pit,” let us put those doubts aside. The guy spared Cordelia’s life because he’s a cat lover! Dogs, with him, are good for nothing but macabre background props. Killing a beaver for strictly selfish reasons deducts another point from Good Stab’s character profile. On the other hand, he gains a lot of points for adopting Weasel Plume and the other napikwan-orphaned buffalo calves. Arthur claims that, apart from his never-met French grandfather, his ancestry is primarily German. I say he must have some Egyptian blood, because he is sure in the running for King of Denial. Now, as late as in Chapter 19, he writes that he hasn’t found “any tangible proof other than his [Good Stab’s] attestation” that his tormentor stands apart from the natural world and its divinely ordained order. It’s a thorny question whether believing in a God or gods is not in itself acceptance of the supernatural. Or if God is in effect all of Nature, then everything that exists must be natural, whether you like that particular aspect of the All or not. Such a belief is a tough ask. Who wants to accept that famine, tornadoes, cancer, and Pick-Your-Scariest-Invertebrate are really acts of God? Good is God with an extra O. There’s no E-V-I-L in GOD! Evil must be apart from God, from Nature, therefore SUPERnatural. That’s better. It’s easier to believe that undesirable elements in one’s Umwelt are of the Devil, hence best eliminated if possible. That would include troublesome peoples, like those “just Indians” of whom Arthur Beaucarne oversees the eradication. But not Pastor Arthur Beaucarne. Previous Arthur’s a “different man, in a different life, and in a different time to boot, with necessities so remote from the contemporary mind as to be practically unretrievable.” While remembering the most visceral details of the massacre, Pastor Arthur can say—can attempt himself to believe—that “I wasn’t really there.” No wonder Good Stab responds to that assertion “in savage objection.” In so savage an exception, in fact, that Arthur stammers his last and feeblest excuse, “They didn’t even fight.” It’s “the first part of the admission Good Stab had been leading [him] toward for weeks.” Combined with seeing Good Stab’s blood-tears and the way his chin quivers just as Arthur’s does, the self-protective, self-destructive shell between Pastor Arthur and Soldier Arthur shatters. He screams from the crucifix, reunited with the raw truth of his past, suppressed and roiling for too long. Good Stab screams along with him, fallen to his knees, forehead to the floor, and though their despairs are their own, the pain of both wails harmonizes into what Arthur comes to believe is the “story of America.” It’s the strongest and most devastating passage in the novel. It’s unbearable, but it must be borne by both actors in the drama of confession and potential absolution. “You tore the heart out of my people,” Good Stab says, still bowed to the floor. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” Arthur says, still on the cross. The potential absolution doesn’t come yet. Given the psychological and spiritual realism to which Graham Jones adheres, it cannot. Arthur can only answer Good Stab’s demand for why he killed with more excuses. Good Stab has one more death to account for. Arthur spared Yellow Kidney’s life at Heavy Runner’s camp. Given the many children he didn’t spare, he feels the emptiness of this claim is as much as Good Stab does. Confession must continue—final or otherwise—in the next chapter of the Nachzehrer’s dark gospel. Next week, prepare for yet another kind of crisis with Matthew McDonald’s “How to Deal With Fallen Gods.”[end-mark] The post Dueling Metaphors: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 10) appeared first on Reactor.