Books Reading the Weird ROUSes Abound: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 12) Arthur’s confession reaches its conclusion, 100 years in the future… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on July 22, 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 wrap up Stephen Graham Jones’s Nebula- and Stoker-winning The Buffalo Hunter Hunter with Chapters 23-24. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead! The Absolution of Three-Persons, June 2, 1912. Arthur Beaucarne pens one last journal entry. On Sunday, all the eggs in the church crack black-yolked with ungodly corruption, so he precracks a yellow-yolked egg from the parsonage for display at mass. The service is still doomed. The purple stole on his podium has been replaced by a buffalo robe. In addition to his parishioners, the dead crowd the pews: Arthur’s son and grandsons, postmaster Clarkson and Sheriff Doyle and Pinkerton man Dove, and all the Blackfeet slain at the Marias. Arthur flees into the parsonage. No one inquires after him. Their preacher has turned leper. Before Good Stab comes for him, he’ll hide this journal. Soon he’ll see Good Stab’s fangs and know he wasn’t lying. Arthur’s heart feels black as the prairie night. His pipe is empty. He believes it’s been empty since January 23, 1870. The Beaucarne Manuscript, 12 January 2013. Etsy Beaucarne has presented her transcription of Arthur’s journal to her tenure committee. They’re unimpressed. One member shows off by remarking that Etsy should call her great-great-great-grandfather her “tresayle” instead—the French are “so much more efficient when discussing lineage.” They also suggest the so-called log may be fiction inspired by Stoker’s Dracula. And so Etsy, the “dayworker” of Communications and Journalism, won’t earn tenure at the University of Wyoming. At the end of spring semester, aged 43, she’ll need to figure out how to earn a living outside academia. One more disappointment for her father, on his deathbed in Denver. At least Etsy’s figured out some of her ancestry. Arthur’s son Benjamin Flowers, her great-great grandfather, was born to Ada Neismith, née Murray, the prostitute he bedded after the Marias Massacre. Benjamin’s surname came from the nurse who misheard “Beaucarne” as “Bouquet” and translated that to “Flowers.” The surname passed to Etsy’s great-grandfather Arthur, then to her grandfather Artemis. Later Ada told Artemis the correct name, and so it came down to Etsy. On her apartment balcony, she burns the copy of the journal that librarian Lydia Ackerman sent her. As the last page lifts away “like a prayer,” she glimpses through the snowstorm a figure behind a tree. She lurches backward so hard she breaks the glass sliding door. Somehow she’s sure it’s Arthur Beaucarne, her tresayle, haunting her. 20 January 2013. A bad week. Etsy’s cat Taz has disappeared. Her father has died, leaving a banker’s box of effects. Among family photos, his last unsmoked cigarettes, his wedding band, and his Zane Grey novels and DVDs, is his Bible with letters from her mother tucked inside, along with one unopened letter. Lydia Ackerman calls to say that the journal’s buckskin wrapping tested out as human skin! Also, has Etsy decided what to do with the original journal in Lydia’s care? Donate it? Auction it? Keep it herself? And Dad’s cremains arrive. Etsy looks at the unopened letter. Ominously, the envelope bears the logo of the Blackfoot nation, but no postmark or stamp. She realizes the letter wasn’t for her father, but for her, delivered in person while Dad lay dying. She doesn’t open it. She’s taking Benadryl to sleep, though it makes her “goopy” enough to hallucinate mice. What’s no hallucination is the figure she wakes to find: Good Stab tapping on her laptop. He’s grown a buffalo’s head; she screams and locks herself in her bedroom. Etsy’s next entry is neither a will or a suicide note, just a record of terror. Good Stab has returned Taz. He’s also arranged a “family reunion” in the form of Arthur Beaucarne, whom he’s made a nachzehrer. What Arthur’s been fed over decades, he has become: a giant prairie dog weeping blood. Good Stab disappears, leaving behind Arthur and his buffalo head (actually a mask). Etsy can’t keep a Rodent of Unusual Size like some rescue animal. She senses his existence is a hellish one. Has Good Stab given her the challenge of murderously feeding Arthur back to human shape, or putting him out of his misery? She sedates him with smoke from her father’s cigarettes and smuggles him into her Subaru, along with Taz and gear from a hardware/ranch superstore. Then she drives through the snowstorm to Wyoming, and Blackfeet territory: Nittowsinan, in time for the anniversary of the Marias Massacre. Etsy finally reads the unopened letter. It’s the confession Arthur wrote, but never sent. In it, he admits that he persuaded the scout Joe Cobell to start shooting at Heavy Runner’s camp, making Arthur ultimately responsible for the slaughter. Etsy manages to “kill” Arthur with a nail gun, cable saw, and ignited spray foam. Burning, his body plummets off the bluff from which soldiers shot Heavy Runner’s people. She throws his prairie dog head after it. Blackfeet riders have come to memorialize the massacre, Good Stab among them. Etsy wishes she could tell him how she stopped at Ackerman’s library earlier and destroyed Arthur’s original journal by pouring her father’s alkaline cremains over its acidic pages. Instead she raises a fist over her head in farewell to Arthur’s tormentor/confessor. He doesn’t return the salute. As he rides off after the other Blackfeet, Etsy sees a yellow hard hat hanging from his saddle. So he was the workman who found Arthur’s journal. The snowstorm swallows Good Stab. The nachzehrer’s gone—no, not the vampire. The Blackfeet. Seven Deadly Sins and Counting: All Arthur’s fussing about gluttony has been because of what he did once in hunger. This doesn’t stop him, as a prairie dog, from chewing on Etsy’s couch like a poorly trained puppy. What’s Cyclopean: The word of the day is “catachresis,” which is using an almost-right word—“mitigate” for “militate,” for example, or “Bouquet” for “Beaucarne.” The Degenerate Dutch: “I give myself permission… It’s what we white folk do.” Libronomicon: Among Etsy’s father’s few remaining possessions is a set of Zane Grey westerns. And an extremely awkward Bible being used as a file cabinet. Weirdbuilding: Etsy is deeply disappointed that her tresayle’s journal doesn’t reveal his fate. She was hoping, I suppose, for a revelatory “The window! The window!” Madness Takes Its Toll: Commit a description of vampiric giant prairie dogs to paper, and it may get you committed. Call 911 without any real explanation, and you’re hysterical, also in both senses of the word. Anne’s Commentary I had a feeling Good Stab might not kill Arthur outright, thus putting him beyond Good Stab’s not-so-tender mercies. The alternative, I figured, would be to make Arthur a nachzehrer, thus able to suffer for much if not all eternity on this earth, just in case the Christian Hell is a myth. Arthur doesn’t seem to have considered this possibility. Otherwise, he might have more strongly considered ruining Good Stab’s fun by committing suicide. Although I believe suicide is a mortal sin. Making it a bad choice if the Christian Hell is NOT a myth. Plus it’s a common superstition that suicides may become vampires, in which case Arthur would end up undead no matter what. Etsy Beaucarne has been whirling about in one of the lower circles of academic hell for a while, the one in which its victims are bedeviled by the dreaded tenure-and-promotions committee. Maybe she could take comfort in the thought that the committee’s Francophile member doesn’t know so much about French genealogical terms as she thinks she does. That, or I’ve messed up my reconstruction of Etsy’s reconstruction of her ancestral line. Here’s what I’ve got: Etsy Beaucarne, herself Etsy’s Dad, father Artemis (Flowers) Beaucarne, grandfather Arthur Flowers, great-grandfather Benjamin Flowers, great-great-grandfather Arthur Beaucarne, great-great-great grandfather Francophile Prof writes in her deleted but not lost comment that “Dr. E” might use the term “tresayle” instead of “great-great-great-grandfather” in referring to Arthur. Wiktionary gives this etymology for tresayle: “From Middle French trisayeul, from Latin tris, tres (“three”) + French aïeul (“grandfather”).” It defines the word as “a grandfather’s grandfather,” hence “a great-great-grandfather.” Not a “great-great-great-grandfather.” Etsy’s tresayle would then be Benjamin Flowers rather than Arthur Beaucarne. It looks like, in addition to the two greats in great-great-grandfather, you have to count the grand. That way you literally get three (tres) grandfathers (ayles.) The term for a great-great-great-grandfather is quatrayle, or the “grandfather of the grandfather of one’s father.” Four (quatr) grandfathers (ayles) would require three greats and a grand, or great-great-great-grandfather. Arthur Beaucarne, you old quatrayle, you. If you didn’t want all those descendants, you should have let Ada Murray use her “pessary,” an early twentieth century term for diaphragms and cervical caps. Instead you gave her some claptrap about how your “intended vocation” meant you couldn’t give her an STD, or presumably, a baby. What, were all Lutheran pastors-to-be fitted with male chastity belts, aka “penis cages.” Do an image-search on those beauties, hackers. Enough fun with words and on to everyone’s favorite mammalian order, the Rodentia. Or at least Goddess’s favorite mammalian order, if you go by number of species. Good Stab talked about putting himself through self-annihilation by eating so many “dirty faces” that he became a giant mouse himself. Either he never tried that undeath-style change, or he gave up and kept his Blackfeet form. Instead it’s Arthur who undergoes drastic rodentification, not to a giant mouse but to a giant prairie dog. Why a prairie dog? A black-tailed prairie dog, I conjecture, as it’s the more abundant species in Montana, with a more northern range than the white-tailed prairie dog. A keystone species, the prairie dog is a highly social animal, both on the “town” (colony) and the family levels. They have developed complex vocal communications, including an array of warning barks. A lone prairie dog would be an anxious and unhappy prairie dog. I’m assuming that Prairie Dog Arthur (PD-Arthur) would have been largely a solitary beast, interacting with other PDs only by dining on them. The more PD-like he became, the greater his torture would be, to long for his “natural” society while being forced to cannibalize on its members. That would be an emotional torture akin to what Good Stab has endured, an outcast forced to feed on Blackfeet in order to remain Blackfeet. See how you like it, Three-Persons, might have been his vengeful taunt. As a human who had largely isolated himself from his fellows, Arthur would probably have accepted this punishment as just, perhaps a Purgatorial trial. Perhaps volunteered to some degree. His only path back to a human form, a fully human mentality, would be to do as Good Stab does and feed on his former kind. In Blackfeet mythology, prairie dogs may be clever tricksters, as well as paragons of family and community. They feature in many stories about Good Stab’s friend, Napi. In spite of its title, “Bobcat and Birch Tree” has much to tell about a game in which the prairie dogs ultimately demonstrate their fellowship, while Napi is, well, ultimately Napi, charming but ever-hungry. Ultimately, Graham Jones’ novel has been for me a beautiful, stunning, harrowing ride. The ending is going to have to sit with me a while before I know what to make of it, but that’s fine. That’s the way of the best books. Ruthanna’s Commentary Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about. Last round I admitted my preference for weird bloody guts over mimetic ones. And here we are, with Etsy killing her giant prairie dog vampire tresayle with the fruits of a hardware store run, in the middle of a blizzard. Leading a giant prairie dog into the back of a clunker, trying to explain the whole thing to an unsympathetic property manager, dragging along a cat because she really does take after Arthur. That’s the stuff. Etsy is having a bad time of everything, even before the journal shows up. Her father’s dying, her career is dying, and her father would be horrified if he woke up long enough to find out about her career. The idea of creating a monograph from the journal is a wild hail Mary pass – she’s a communication studies prof, not an historian. It’s not her field. It’s just there. It’s the way academia doesn’t care about Life Happening, or the context from which you come, but is full of prejudicial practices that it doesn’t acknowledge because it couldn’t possibly have context and human limitations. (I once got a year added to my tenure clock for my wife’s medically complex pregnancy, then criticized for not using that year to work up extra publications.) So it’s no surprise that the journal drives her over the edge. She was expecting nice everyday history, admirable vocabulary, something to exploit and explain, and instead she gets this. There’s maybe a communications monograph to be gotten out of it – could it be treated as a parable? Lutheran pastor creates a fictional vampire story to illustrate how people engage with sin and (lack of) forgiveness? But she believes Arthur’s confession/absolution, if nothing else, and is in just the right (wrong) place to make his guilt her own. And, after all, the guilt for America’s genocidal campaigns against native nations is collective. She’s living on stolen land, that her ancestors helped to steal. (Why does Arthur label his own sections “absolution” and Good Stab’s “confession”? Is Good Stab not seeking absolution for his own guilt? Is Arthur not, reluctantly, confessing?) And finally, in Arthur’s last letter, Good Stab forcibly shares that ancestor’s very specific role in the theft. He was not another soldier caught up in diffusion of responsibility. He was studying to be a priest, riding along to study sin as if it were a spectator sport, and instead incited the sin with his own silver preacher’s tongue. He was hungry, drunk, frozen, desperate to return to the land of rations. He didn’t care whether they were at “the right camp,” and whispered murder in the ear of the one guy who might have cared. Thus his guilt at indulging in his parishioner’s food, not so much a distraction from his real sin as a symptom of it. He has murdered for gluttony before. Good Stab, then, turns Arthur into a fellow nachzehrer. Like his “mentor” Cat Man, he then feeds his victim into a punishing shape. In the process, it seems, he learns that eating mice wouldn’t end his own human suffering, but would simply turn him into a giant rodent. (Which means Cat Man is still out there somewhere as a miserable fish, hoping to get a bite of fisherman.) Perhaps that’s why, a century later, Good Stab’s still in fully human form, and has found ways to join with other Blackfeet in their ceremonies. Is he growing comfortable with his new nature, or—his vengeance done—will he now seek animalistic semi-oblivion? And how long will it take Arthur to grow back? His head is still down in that ravine, snapping. So nothing is really over—not the theft of land and life, not any of the three bloodsuckers, and not Etsy’s need to deal with the fallout of the past month. There’s no easy wrap-up. Just the continuing tangle of sin, and guilt, and confession, and inadequate absolution. Next week, we fail at tourism in Nadia Bulkin’s “Things to Know Before You Go.” You can find it in Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora. Then join us as we begin our new longread: H. G. Wells’s classic The Island of Dr. Moreau.[end-mark] The post ROUSes Abound: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 12) appeared first on Reactor.