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You Are What You Eat: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 3)
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You Are What You Eat: Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Part 3)
Good Stab recounts awakening to his new life, where he can, with his nose, “taste” the living things around him…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on March 18, 2026
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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 5-6 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. The book was first published in 2025. Spoilers ahead!
April 7, 1912: The dog that licked the murdered man has died of poison, as Sheriff Doyle suspected it would. Good Stab has returned to Arthur Beaucarne’s back pew, so obviously that proves he’s not dead as claimed. Or does it? In Arthur’s mind, Christian faith and rational disbelief fend off terror.
Stab pointedly asks if Arthur’s nervous finger-rubbing comes from his experience in the wars. Arthur nods, conceding that from his age alone Good Stab could deduce his involvement in the Civil War and subsequent frontier conflicts. He shares his dinner of antelope stew, but Good Stab only holds his bowl, not eating. At last, he invites Good Stab to resume his story: “I listen with a good heart.”
The Nachzehrer’s Dark Gospel—April 7, 1912: Good Stab tells how he earned his name. At twelve, he was riding with a hunting party, including his father. They came upon a buffalo herd trailed by a white soldier, hunching along as if he’d forgotten he was “two-legged.” Later they saw he’d been shot under his right eye. The hunters tied him by one foot to a tree. They then resumed their hunt, leaving Good Stab to guard him. While Good Stab was arranging his arrows the soldier got free, grabbed him from behind, and strangled him. Good Stab struggled until his vision was blacking out, before snagging an arrow and blindly stabbing his attacker. The arrow pierced deep inside the soldier’s bullet wound, killing him. It was a “good stab,” one of the hunters remarked. His father agreed, and so “Good Stab” received the honor and responsibility of his warrior’s name.
That “buffalo-man” was the first soldier he killed. The next five were those he fought in the Backbone. The sixth he tracked down after that confrontation, when he woke to find himself leaping through the snow on all fours. From the snow’s condition, he reckons he’s slept four or five days. A layer of black, burned skin covers him; he brushes it off like scorched bark. With his nose, he can “taste” the living things around him.
He must crouch in tree-shadow during the day, because sunlight burns his eyes. When night returns, he runs down the soldier and sinks teeth into his neck. The blood makes him feel “more warm and alive than [he’s] ever been.” He suckles like a baby until the soldier’s “empty and dead.” But he can’t eat the marrow. Anything but blood, his body rejects.
It’s his punishment for killing the beaver, and he deserves it. He has turned into the Cat Man’s child, armed with dagger-fangs that pull back between uses: an atupyoye, a Person-Eater such as the Pikuni have always known, but worse. He tries to kill himself by cutting his own throat, stabbing himself in the heart, but his wounds heal. Cursed so he can’t ease his thirst even with water, he must fill himself to bursting with living blood. He sometimes cuts himself to drain the excess and his tears are blood, not salt-water. His eyes pierce the darkness, but can’t bear the sight of Sun Chief. So, Three-Persons has the answer to why he walks by day wearing glasses that make an artificial night.
He overwinters in a den with a hibernating bear, but it’s too strong for him to devour when they both wake ravenous in spring. Instead he drinks antelopes and deer until he begins to grow a spotted hide and horns. To keep a man’s form, he must drink only from men. White trappers become his staple. One night he climbs Face Mountain and sits for twenty-one days thinking of his former life. He lets Sun Chief burn his skin to leather. He fasts until hunger drives him to hunt. The first two-leg he sees, he falls upon. Too late he realizes his prey is a young Pikuni from his own band, White Teeth who lost fingers mishandling Good Stab’s prized gun.
He runs from the sight of the Backbone, away from himself, what he’s done, what he is. Near the Blood Clot Hills he finds a herd of slain buffalo, with no meat taken from them, only their robes. They’ve been killed by bullets. He kneels to close the eyes of one blackhorn, wondering who could have committed such a slaughter. Then he too is shot, through the shoulder, and falls so that a buffalo horn jabs through his hand. He can still feel the cold of that piercing. Does it really hurt even now, or is his memory that strong?
This is his telling for today. The pipe is empty.
What’s Cyclopean: Good Stab uses “blackhorn” or “real-meat” in his storytelling, “buffalo” otherwise. But sometimes, less intentionally, he falls back on his own Pikuni “coughing word with all the i’s in it.”
The Degenerate Dutch: An American (white, Christian, etc.) has a duty “to attempt to capture these last exhalations of a people who won’t be seen again in the world.”
Weirdbuilding: Good Stab connects what’s happened to him not with European vampyr myths, but with Pikuni stories of an atupyoye or Person-Eater.
Libronomicon: Arthur Beaucarne compares himself to Alexander Pope, erring “in such a way as to make your own efforts grandiose.” But he also compares his record of Good Stab’s confession to a new Gospel. Which is certainly aggrandizing something.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Vampiric existence comes on a scale. At 0, you’re basically a zombie: a soul-less monster with no memory of human life, a qualia-free threat to everyone around you. At 10, you can drink without killing or at least live off animals, have few classic limitations, and get cool powers and immortality to make it all worthwhile. In between lies a whole spectrum from “miserable killer mourning lost humanity” to “If it’s not from New Orleans it’s just sparkling angst.”
Good Stab, poor guy, falls on the lower end of the spectrum. Cons: He remembers his human existence, but is forever cut off from the community that would make him himself. He has little control over his feeding, and he becomes what he eats. Mixed: Shades let him walk the day, but his speed and strength are more a factor of being willing to break things (that admittedly heal quickly) than new-found physical power. Pros: His sense of smell is enhanced into full-on taste, pictures even. He can share the dreams of a hibernating bear.
The balance doesn’t appeal. But he can’t kill himself with any of the available tools. If he really wanted out, he could live off fish until he turns into a blood-sucking fish-monster, but that also doesn’t appeal.
Anywhere above the scale’s zero-line, your unlife is shaped in part by attitude. Are you gonna carpe that noctem, or is your bloodlust a curse? If a curse, does it at least come with a purpose?
Good Stab has answers: he chose his lust for napikwan weapons over the Pikuni’s beaver protectors, and he paid the price. His monstrous appetites are a punishment. He’s an animal who remembers being human – but not a natural, sacred animal. Where he feeds, nothing else can make use of hide or meat. Former guides abandon him, no possibility of new purpose. And he can’t even protect his people, because even when he tries to stick to white trappers, he fails.
And yet, Arthur senses some purpose. Attitude’s at work here, too. Because to Arthur, Good Stab’s purpose is to remind him of his sins. Indigenous people are symbolic, right? A remnant of something old and dying, hanging on just long enough to make white people feel guilty. Better take notes on how they protect their houses from cold and dog piss, lest those ancient ways be entirely forgotten.
If the Pikuni were real, an old white guy might have to acknowledge that they could be sinned against in their own right.
Arthur has plenty to feel guilty about, including occasionally the meta-guilt from wallowing in sins predating his “rebirth.” I doubt anyone really cares how fast he eats his congregants’ cakes, and a good baker enjoys having her work appreciated. He’s suffered fairly directly for his alcoholism, and lives in a time when little is known of the medical side of addiction and recovery. At Good Stab’s latest visit he’s suffering muscle shakes, probably from withdrawal as he tries once again to escape drowning in that “amber and golden sea.” All he knows is that “a glass of sweet sherry settles that right down.” Or two glasses.
But some of his guilt seems more justified. Those skinned buffalo, each killed with a single shot… was Arthur involved in that sin, that keeps surfacing in everyone’s stories? And what did he do to survive his battlefields?
Good Stab’s errors are his own, and whatever Arthur may think, he’ll have his own reasons for his confession. But it also seems that he and Arthur are tied together by more than their near ages, and I suspect that includes the mistakes they’ve made in—and beyond—life.
Anne’s Commentary
What writer of the weird wouldn’t eventually want to embrace the genre’s icon of icons?
As Conner Read writes in his Publishers Weekly article on The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones wasn’t eager to add vampires to his icon life-list, along with the zombies of Zombie Bake-Off and the werewolves of Mongrels:
For a long time, [Graham Jones] steered clear of vampires…The gothic creatures have, according to the author, accumulated a lot of ‘junk DNA’ since the days of Bram Stoker…Also, Jones argues, the image of the cape-wearing, fang-sporting vampire is ‘so codified — everybody knows what it is.’ If he were ever to approach the subject matter, Jones knew he’d have to find his own way in.
In fact, all who people their fiction with bloodsuckers must find their own way. That includes those who stick to established tropes and those who reinvent, customize, personalize, via hunting down their own inner vampire. Personalization is the most dangerous and hence the most powerful approach. In an Austin Chronicle interview, Graham Jones seems to challenge himself by claiming, “If I were a vampire, I could do it better.” It’s a much more rigorous “promise” than, say, “If I were to write a vampire story, I could do it better.”
To write a decent vampire story, the rock-bottom must-have is a monster whose attributes, abilities, weaknesses, ethics, and species-origin story work together to make a believable, consistent being—and one who serves the story being told. The vampire “genre” encompasses (or is encompassed by) many “co-genres”: horror, fantasy, science fiction, romance, mystery, historical, thriller, humor/satire.
To write a great vampire story, maybe the writer does have to become the vampire.
Graham Jones is right that the vampire has acquired a genome-confuddling mass of “junk DNA” over the centuries of its folkloric and literary existence. However, that means he’s not quite right to add that the vampire is “so codified—everybody knows what it is.” Arthur Beaucarne’s definition of the Nachzehrer contains just one universal vampire feature. They don’t all “rise nightly from the grave,” but they do all “subsist on the lives of the living.” Apart from that, the vampire-maker has lots of choices to consider, many binary. Some examples:
Is your vampire a realistic creature (somehow accounted for within natural laws), or is it supernatural, mythical, fantastical?
Is your vampire dead or alive or somewhere above, below or in-between, as in undead? Put another way, has it ever died?
Does your vampire subsist on blood and/or flesh or on some form of “life-force”? Other dietary restrictions?
Where’s your vampire on the appearance spectrum between fully human and monstrous? Can its appearance vary? To the point of shape-shifting? Voluntarily or involuntarily?
Is your vampire immortal, mortal but long-lived, as mortal as the rest of us? If immortal, can it be permanently killed, and how?
Basic temperament: Is your vampire zombie-like or feral, human or superhuman, variable?
What are your vampire’s superhuman powers, if any? Super-strength, super-speed, super-senses, psi abilities, flight, shape-alteration (as to a bat, wolf, mist, etc.)?
What are your vampire’s weaknesses? Photosensitivity (mild through lethal.) Coffin or grave-bound, always or during certain periods? Repellable by garlic, fire, other natural substances? Why. Repellable by sacred or otherwise culturally significant objects? Why.
Happy to be a vampire? Ambivalent? Angsted-out? Depends on mood?
Solitary or part of a vampiric social structure?
Can create new vampires? Whenever it feeds or when it chooses to? What’s the process?
Immoral; amoral; has some positive principles, values, codes of conduct?
Too sexy for its cape? In a romantic or villainous way? Depends on the prey item?
In Chapter Six, Good Stab starts learning the “rules” of his new existence. He has died and can die, but he revives each time, perhaps barring catastrophic injury. He heals quickly. He can only subsist on liquid blood. All normal human intake, including water, sickens him. Though he can go weeks between feedings, his blood-hunger’s a powerful drive, irresistible if too long denied. Once battened on, he must drink a victim to the last drop even if surfeited to bursting. However, if he continues drinking after the victim’s heart stops, the “dead” blood’s evacuated through his skin. He can subsist on animals as well as humans, but BIG CAVEAT: He’ll become what he eats, acquiring the dominant prey’s physical attributes. Therefore, his appearance can vary between fully human and a monstrous blend of man and beast. A diet of humans allows him to pass as human since his fangs are retractable. He’s photosensitive to sunlight and other illumination, shields his eyes and skin, but can travel by day. Sacred objects have no effect on him. His temperament remains basically human, and he hasn’t forgotten his pre-vampiric history. Emotionally, therefore, he’s a wreck. He wanders solitary while longing for the life and people he’s lost. If there are other vampires, he hasn’t met them nor has he made any. It seems he was made when he was not only bitten by Cat-Man but inadvertently drank the cannon-bisected Cat-Man’s blood.
Good Stab retains the moral sense of a Pikuni and suffers more angst therefore. Too sexy for his robes? Not in this chapter, though by the time he meets Arthur Beaucarne, he’s gained a compelling presence.
On the realism and fantasy scale, Good Stab vacillates around the midpoint. That this hasn’t bothered me may be explained by Graham Jones’s Austin Chronicle observation: “The world [Good Stab] lives in, that he grew up in, that he knows, does not distinguish between the natural and the supernatural even a little bit.”
In putting across that crucial part of the character’s mindset, Graham Jones has so far been solidly consistent.
Next week, we’re in the mood for fungus among us: join us for Jeff VanderMeer’s “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose.” You can find it in Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Fungi anthology.[end-mark]
The post You Are What You Eat: Stephen Graham Jones’ <i>The Buffalo Hunter Hunter</i> (Part 3) appeared first on Reactor.
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