Throughout his 25-year career, bestselling horror novelist Stephen Graham Jones has mixed with a mélange of demons, including zombies (in Zombie Bake-Off), werewolves (Mongrels), and good old-fashioned serial killers (I Was a Teenage Slasher). But for a long time, he steered clear of vampires. In the grand scheme of monster lore, Jones says, bloodsuckers get off too easily.
The gothic creatures have, according to the author, accumulated a lot of “junk DNA” since the days of Bram Stoker. Modern vampires “can feed off of, like, six people in one night, and those six people maybe forget they got fed upon,” he says via Zoom from his home in Colorado, a Telluride Horror Show beanie on his head and a Ghostface mask at his back. “The victim suffers no harm, and the vampire suffers no harm. I’m a strict believer that there’s a price for everything.” 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. And with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, out in March from Saga, he’s done just that. Drawing inspiration from the nested narratives of Philip K. Dick, Jones’s first vampire novel—and one of his most ambitious narrative undertakings—wraps the confessions of a tortured Indigenous bloodsucker within a pair of frame stories.
Bookending the action are dispatches from Etsy Beaucarne, a frustrated academic in 2012 Wyoming who learns the journal of her great-great-great-grandfather, Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne, has been discovered. Arthur’s diary entries catalog a series of strange deaths among his congregation in 1912 Montana and describe the day the pastor was visited by a stoic Blackfeet man wearing sunglasses and a clergyman’s robe. The visitor identifies himself as Good Stab and implores Arthur to receive his confession. Though Arthur’s Lutheranism is a barrier (The Buffalo Hunter Hunter has fewer jokes than the average Jones novel, but they’re there), he agrees. And so begins the bulk of the story, in which Good Stab outlines the people he’s killed and the blood he’s sucked since he was first transformed into a “Cat Man” while seeking vengeance for the real-life Marias Massacre of 1870, during which American forces murdered an entire camp of Blackfeet in cold blood.
Though the novel pays painstaking attention to historical accuracy, it plays fast and loose with vampire traditions. Good Stab’s damnation comes with a wickedly satisfying pair of rules: he must feed on his prey until it’s dry—sometimes causing his side to literally burst open—and he grows to resemble whatever he’s feeding from. If Good Stab wants to maintain a physical connection to his Blackfeet heritage, he must offset his preferred diet of animals and white settlers with significant helpings of his own people.
“That was the essential bind that I had so much fun putting him in,” Jones says, smirking. “It’s weird to say ‘fun’ in the sense of doing terrible things to people, but, you know, as a fiction writer, that’s the job. The good stories don’t happen in heaven. They happen in hell.”
It’s a lesson Jones learned early. While growing up in the mesquite pastures of rural Texas—he was born in Midland in 1972—he got his kicks frolicking among the horse carcasses his uncle would discard beside his home. When he was six, he vividly remembers answering the door to his 19-year-old aunt and uncle, who were too freaked out by a screening of Halloween to sleep in their own trailer. “I remember holding the screen door open for them and, as they shuffled inside, looking out into the great blackness of the pasture and wondering what could scare these amazing people so badly that they need to sleep on the floor with me,” Jones recalls. “That was the inflection point for me, in terms of horror.”
Despite his early macabre interests, Jones didn’t always know he’d be freaking people out for a living. After frequently moving around Texas as a kid (his dad was in the Air Force; his mom cycled through jobs), he enrolled at Texas Tech University as a philosophy student in 1990. When Jones was a freshman, his uncle suffered life-threatening burns, prompting Jones to take time away from school and visit him in the ICU. During hospital downtime, Jones started scribbling a morbid short story about a young woman on the precipice of death. He submitted it to a philosophy professor just to prove he’d been working on something, and the professor submitted it for a schoolwide writing contest, which Jones won. As he recalls, “It made me go, Oh, you can do this?” He’s been putting pen to paper ever since.
Still, if it weren’t for a staffing quirk while pursuing his PhD, he might never have become a novelist. At the last minute, a literature professor Jones hardly knew had to sub in on his dissertation defense panel. Unbeknownst to Jones, the man owned a small press called Fiction Collective 2; he ended up liking Jones’s work—the early sketch of his novel The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong—so much that he asked to publish it. After some hand-wringing, Jones agreed, and went on to write three to four books a year for more than a decade.
The author might have continued cruising along at what he calls an “amiable weirdo” altitude if his 2016 werewolf coming-of-age novel, Mongrels, hadn’t garnered some light buzz, putting all eyes on Jones when he published the phantasmagorical slasher The Only Good Indians in 2020. It was a hit. Suddenly, and after two decades at bat, Jones was becoming a household name.
Despite the welcome attention, the shift was something of a double-edged sword. Jones—who says he grew up largely “severed” from his Blackfeet heritage—worried that the novel precipitated the idea that “Indian stories only happened on the reservation.” To course correct, he followed it with a trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and The Angel of Indian Lake) centered on Jade Daniels, a teenage girl similarly cut off from her Indigenous ancestry. After that, he went full Scream for the pulpy-funny I Was a Teenage Slasher. Those detours, Jones says, made him feel better about returning to the “Good Indians lane” for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
Still, in the book’s acknowledgments, Jones expresses light anxiety that he’s made a spectacle of his own people. “I started to get nervous that whoever was running the show during my book tour was going to say, ‘Read this portion from Good Stab,’ and then suddenly I’m at the mic reading these Blackfeet terms that have been crudely turned into English,” Jones says. “It might feel like, Why don’t I just put on a beaded vest and dance for them too?” At the end of the day, though, he’s not sweating it too hard. “It’ll be fun to figure out,” he says with a laugh.
While Jones spent years feeling resentful of his success’s late arrival, he’s grown to see it as a blessing. “I have a novel about a time-traveling invisible caterpillar, which I kind of had a sense wasn’t going to rocket to the top of the charts when I wrote it,” he says. “But I got to see what I could do. I got to test my muscles on the page in all these wild, ridiculous ways. For so many writers, their first book hits big, and they get stuck writing that same book with the names changed for the rest of their career. I can sense that they want to write a giant, invisible, time-traveling caterpillar novel, and their editor won’t let them. But I’ve already done that.”
Now, Jones can add shape-shifting vampire novel about America’s original sin to the list.
