Books Reading the Weird Cleaning After Confession: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 11) The Cat-Man returns as Good Stab’s confession draws to a close… By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on July 8, 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 21-22 of Stephen Graham Jones’s Nebula- and Stoker-winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel, May 5 1912. Good Stab flees the Fat Melters Camp after the murders of Yellow Kidney and his sister. All Pikuni will now be at war with him, though in this case he isn’t responsible. Good Stab wakes to meet Cat Man, who is responsible. He wants Good Stab to suffer, a “disease” to his people. Good Stab goes to his buffalo herd and finds all dead, and the semi-flayed Weasel Plume dying. He euthanizes the bull by crushing his heart. As he weeps blood, a voice behind him says, “Well, that was melodramatic.” That the Cat Man’s been subsisting on long-legs is obvious from his elongated limbs, antlers and yellow eyes. That he speaks Pikuni means he’s spent time in Pikuni camps. He shrugs off questions about his origins. He’s 450 years old, and knows things Good Stab can’t even imagine. To demonstrate his superior strength, he tears off Weasel Plume’s massive head. If Good Stab were worth his time, not just an accident, he could educate him, show him “the world in all its misery and grandeur.” But if all Good Stab wants is to die, why should Cat Man deny him? Good Stab accepts Cat Man’s challenge. Each takes a goring from Weasel Plume’s horns. Good Stab drinks Cat Man’s blood, hoping it will strengthen him. But Cat Men can’t drink each other, and instead it sends him into a coma. He wakes in a glacial cave, hands and knees frozen into the icy floor. He breaks an arm struggling to free it and uses his exposed bone to dig out his good arm and legs. He wanders a maze of tunnels studded with human and animal remains. Cat Man must have lived here for years. Good Stab starts encountering living Pikuni, sustenance provided by his captor. The third winter, Cat Man supplies only napikwans. One says that outside, Pikuni are starving, buffalo are decimated, and Indian territory shrinks. Good Stab finds a flint arrowhead buried in the man’s flesh, and makes a torch of scavenged clothing to melt his way out. He carries Weasel Plume’s skull to the top of Chief Mountain, a worthy shrine. Then he searches for his people. Eventually he finds the Small Robes’ camp. He now looks napikwan, and they bring him to their new chief. Walks Twice looks Pikuni, but is in fact Cat Man. He hides his true nature by claiming that for his “medicine” to stay strong he must avoid sunlight. Cat Man defers final judgment on Good Stab until he and his hunters return. Good Stab will remain, bound to a post. Children gather to observe him. One girl, Kills-in-the-Water, communicates through hand signs. Seeing sunlight bothers him, the children tie cloth over his eyes. The hunting party returns with only two bulls, and one hunter missing. Cat Man arranges an untimely Sun Dance. Though this upsets the whole camp, no one opposes him. Good Stab is forced to dance in place of a proper Pikuni initiate to manhood, with Kills-in-the-Water the medicine woman who pushes the impelling pegs into his chest. She’s crying “about the wrongness of this.” The dance done, Cat Man carries Good Stab off to the Backbone. There he breaks Good Stab’s legs, spine and one arm, and leaves him to an agonizingly slow recovery. The last of his revitalizing meals are Blue Mud People fleeing soldiers; these leave him Indian again. He finds that the Small Robes have fled Cat Man’s voracity. He meets Kills-in-the-Water and her brother, who fear him, but he builds them a lean-to and brings them food. The last part of Good Stab’s confession he tells with reluctance. He’s returned to the Small Robes’ corpse-littered winter camp. He sets Walks Twice’s lodge on fire and waits. Cat Man comes. He killed these people because they kept hiding Kills-in-the-Water, even daubing themselves with her blood and scattering. Once in a century, someone’s born with blood their kind will do anything for. Kills-in-the-Water will be only the third Cat Man’s ever drunk. Good Stab proposes a bargain: He’ll bring Cat Man Kills-in-the-Water if he’ll then leave, and spare the surviving Pikuni. But first, he returns with the three hundred remaining buffalo. They trample Cat Man flat, but he still throws Good Stab aside and starts to stand. Good Stab rushes back to Kills-in-the-Water. Her brother’s died of the cold; alone, she clings to Good Stab as his daughter used to, all the way to an island below Face Mountain. Her embrace makes what follows his worst sin: He holds her for Cat Man. He then bites blood from his own tongue, mixes it with blood he took from the girl’s shoulder, and injects the mixture back into her. That full mouthful of Good Stab’s blood leaves Cat Man puppy-weak. Good Stab spends four winters feeding Cat Man sturgeons. Then he releases his enemy into the lake, a fish trapped forever in the water. Good Stab searches for Pikuni camps, but finds none. It’s Starvation Winter, with corpses frozen into the snow-crust and Pikuni wasting away at Old Agency where rations never come. His confession’s done. He leaves Three-Persons now, in the church, with his own dead. The Absolution of Three-Person, May 26, 1912. Two weeks after Good Stab’s last confession, Arthur finally returns to his journal. The mice have returned to his church, but Cordelia has not, nor does Arthur dare to steal her again. The mice probably smell the lingering rot of the pews’ dead occupants, now removed by deputies sworn to secrecy. Of course, news of the macabre spectacle has leaked out anyway. Arthur has scrubbed and scrubbed. If only he could scrub clean his memory. He has sunk to so low that he can’t even comfort himself on the stream of victuals delivered by parishioners. The mice were having daily banquets in the pantry until Arthur started feeding stray dogs. He does keep eggs on hand, not to eat but to detect “the proximity of servants of the Pit.” Every Sunday he demonstrates to parishioners the sanctity of their chapel by cracking an egg into a chalice. So far the yolks have been yellow. Arthur did get one shock when an Indian wearing dark spectacles appeared, but it was only Amos Short Ribs. He has told Mose to supply Amos with bottles on Arthur’s tab. The Blackfeet are “a cursed people, and the quicker they become tillers of the soil and tenders of cattle, the better” both for Montana and Arthur’s own “sanity and sanctity.” It remains for him to bear the torture of waiting for Good Stab to select the day of his execution. The Degenerate Dutch: Cat Man has destroyed whole peoples, “lost to history,” and promises that the Pikuni will go the same way. Libronomicon: Of Good Stab, Arthur says “look upon his works and despair!” Which makes him Shelley’s Ozymandias, two vast and trunkless legs of stone plus boasting. New deep lore: the rest of Ozymandias got torn apart by a vampire and scattered to slow his healing. Weirdbuilding: Cat Man mocks Good Stab by promising to force him into a different kind of story—the villain in a tale of a hero who defeats monster after monster. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: Appetite spoiled by Good Stab’s confession, Arthur blames the feral dogs for their “gluttony” with his parishioners’ donations. Ruthanna’s Commentary The thing is that (a) I love horror and (b) I am easily squicked out. It’s not that blood and guts scare me, it’s that I’m very good at imagining corporeal damage and it’s an unpleasant experience. Give me unnamable experiences with extradimensional incursions any day. Or give me chewy thematic ideas that I can focus on while I try not to think too hard about the body horror. And if there have to be bloody guts, better that they be weird. Snyder’s metamorphoses were a lot easier to deal with than the open brain slurping, which is easier again than a near-mundane infected wound. Jones is very good, and his themes are very chewy. But the climax of Good Stab’s confession has a lot of ick. A lot of visceral, easy-to-visualize ick. So I am having trouble thinking about the themes because I’m too distracted by having to tear off your hand that’s been frozen into a glacier. Which reminds me way too much of Aron Lee Ralston’s story (CW for much like Good Stab’s story but in real life). It’s hard to type when I’m thinking about this stuff, because I become way too self-conscious about my wrists. I had enough trouble handling a 2-centimeter cut in my thumb a couple of weeks ago. I would not enjoy being a Jonesian vampire. But then, no one else seems to enjoy it either. Leaving aside the grievous bodily harm, or trying to, we learn this week that it’s possible to survive even what happened to Cat Man during Good Stab’s “rebirth.” It just takes a while to recover. And it makes you—or at least, Cat Man—really mad. One of the thematic throughlines that I’m following, under the amputations, is what remains for a nachzehrer of their original life and self. Cat Man is cut off from his own origins, but seems to have come originally from Europe. (Did someone stick him on a ship while he was injured, trying to get rid of him? Did he board to feed, and accidentally go on a transatlantic voyage?) He’s 450 years old, which means he was barely 20 at the time of re-contact. He doesn’t care about his people, doesn’t think of mortals as people at all, the supernatural equivalent of whiteness erasing culture. His list of “ship” cognates starts with “nava,” which might be a Latin variant, and goes on into French, Spanish, a Slavic tongue, Czech, and Russian. He’s not thinking about what he would’ve called it in childhood, nor about what languages are meaningful to Good Stab, just running a cursory finger through his memory file. (Except, then, there’s that ring. A past to be swallowed over and over so that it isn’t—quite—lost.) What he does have, still, is cruelty and an instinct for vengeance. That matches Good Stab, who’s been trying to hold onto his cultural identity and remnant purpose, but who mostly ends up killing and punishing, messily. After another couple of centuries, where would he be? Especially if fellow nachzehrers kept taking the opportunity to destroy the things he cares about whenever he crosses them. All that can’t be taken is hunger, and, um, hanger. And the urge to destroy whatever makes you hangry. Which makes it especially interesting that he doesn’t fully destroy Arthur—though there are still two chapters remaining, and Arthur still expects to die. Instead he forces Arthur to grapple with his own past, and with Good Stab’s. While hung from a cross, in a church full of corpses, admittedly. Not exactly traditional. Still, it turns out that the confession isn’t entirely a farce. One death, out of all those Good Stab is responsible for, has stuck in his conscience. But why confess to an enemy? To a Christian? Why beg for approval? The whole urge seems un-Pikuni. There’s something missing, still, from this picture. And now, what’s missing is Good Stab. Arthur reports the corpses, gets help cleaning them out, returns to serving his flock. He’s lost his once-voracious appetite and his denial, but he’s alive and has his community. Still, he thinks of Good Stab as a representative “savage,” rather than a monster by both napikwan and Pikuni standards. Still, he wishes the surrounding nations “civilized” as quickly as possible, made into tame farmers who don’t know the beavers or the crows or the Backbone. Wishes a world divided into humans and resources to be exploited, with no space left for monsters. Anne’s Non-Commentary: Anne will return from her mysterious island next week, in whatever form the water shapes her. Next week, Marjorie Bowen’s “The Bishop of Hell” offers an older story-confession. In addition to Project Gutenberg, you can find it in Mike Ashley’s Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories From the Women of the Weird.[end-mark] The post Cleaning After Confession: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 11) appeared first on Reactor.