Native American history | Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Author: Stephen Graham Jones
Publisher: Saga Press
Publication date: March 18, 2025
Length: 448 pages
Genre: Horror / historical fiction
Source: Library
Rating:

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians comes a tale of the American West, writ in blood.

This chilling historical novel is set in the nascent days of the state of Montana, following a Blackfeet Indian named Good Stab as he haunts the fields of the Blackfeet Nation looking for justice.

It begins when a diary written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall in 2012. What is unveiled is a slow massacre, a nearly forgotten chain of events that goes back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow, told in the transcribed interviews with Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar and unnaturally long life over a series of confessional visits.

This is an American Indian revenge story, captured in the vivid voices of the time, by one of the new masters of literary horror, Stephen Graham Jones.

Unpopular opinion time: This story of a vampire seeking revenge for the massacre of his people, the Blackfeet of Montana, should have been right up my alley… and yet, I had to force myself to stick with it and slog my way through to the end.

This book has an endless number of rave reviews, including from media sources and bloggers I tend to align with. And yet, it just didn’t work for me.

There’s a great premise: A newly discovered diary left behind by a Lutheran pastor in 1912 reveals a shocking set of confessions from a Blackfeet named Good Stab. Good Stab seeks out Arthur Beaucarne to share the story of his unnaturally long life, his transformation into a vampire, and the punishments he’s meted out to those he deems responsible for murdering his people.

And yet, I found myself disengaged and frustrated throughout much of the book. There are some compelling and horrifying set pieces, some very moving interludes as Good Stab recounts what’s happened to the Blackfeet and to the buffalos… and yet, the story he tells is full of names, places, and incidents that loop and cross, sometimes dropping important pieces of information into long bits of a tale so that they get more or less buried. I found it confusing to track the who and how and why of many of the developments, and ultimately ended up caring far less than I should have, with what should have been big revelations falling flat.

I’m definitely in the minority on this one. By the end, I just wanted it all to be over.

Sigh. Not a book for me.

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Shelf Control is a weekly celebration of the unread books on our shelves. Pick a book you own but haven’t read, write a post about it (suggestions: include what it’s about, why you want to read it, and when you got it), and link up! For more info on what Shelf Control is all about, check out my introductory post, here.

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Title: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
Author: Dee Brown
Published: Originally published 1970; 30th anniversary edition published 2001
Length: 509 pages

What it’s about (synopsis via Goodreads):

Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling history The New York Times called “Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking…Impossible to put down.”
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown’s eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. For this elegant thirtieth-anniversary edition—published in both hardcover and paperback—Brown has contributed an incisive new preface.
Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was really won.

How and when I got it:

I bought the Kindle edition several years ago.

Why I want to read it:

I’ve been exploring Native American fiction over the years, but feel like there are still so many gaps in my knowledge when it comes to understanding the history of Native Americans and the impact of US policies.

I’ve been hearing about this book for ages, and I know it’s considered a modern classic. A family member just read it and raved about it, and that reminded me that this has been on my to-read list for far too long.

I never seem to find time for non-fiction, but this is yet another one that I need to make a priority. From everything I’ve heard, this is an important and powerful look into history and the lasting effects of the US’s westward expansion and settlement upon native populations.

What do you think? Would you read this book?

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