RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksWithin this traumatic historical framing, Jones provides his own unique take on the story of an iconic monster’s insatiable taste for blood as an uncanny portal to the haunting specter of American genocide ... Beyond its unique melding of native cultural history and horror tropes, along with a cast of well-wrought characters, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter succeeds as a meticulously plotted story that brings the traumatic resonances of the Marias Massacre to his readers’ consciousness ... The stark brevity reflects the restraint demanded by the enormity of a crime that endures in Blackfeet memory, a burden so profound that the horror genre itself becomes the most fitting vessel for its retelling ... Jones crafts a vivid narrative by placing this character in dialogue with a frontier minister, which elevates scenes of terror and grotesqueness beyond the possibilities usually afforded to genre fiction ... Bestowing the story with a crisp emotional resonance that flows naturally from his characters’ fateful connection ... Through Jones’s masterful fusion of what Beaucarne reformulates as \'the nachzehrer’s dark gospel,\' detailing a story that he hopes will reveal \'the rocky soil of the human soul\' an intricate literary account centered on historical catastrophe is produced ... A heartening reminder that the books and stories that give meaning to our lives and memories, endowing our identities with the vital inheritance of diverse experience, never exist in isolation, and neither do we.
Stephen Graham Jones
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe anticipation and dread Jones’s stories provoke are amplified in his unique take on the slasher by associations with holidays such as Thanksgiving and Columbus Day, presented with their colonial entanglements so that the arrival of Columbus in 1492 is not seen as an occasion for historical celebration but \'a storm so bad it eats the world.\' Yet, whatever form the monstrous takes in Jones’s work, he is a master at creating a storied presence that settles deep into our psyches ... transcends borders and temporal dimensions or, more appropriately, creates its own ... this is what distinguishes Jones’s writing — he eschews the facile answers, clichéd figures, and binary alignments that serve so often as fixed sites of victimry and tragedy. In the complex merging of space, place, and history that Jones activates in his fiction, it is clear that he wants readers to know something of these places and to make them become a part of us, as well ... delivers just the kind of narrative slow burn Jones has become known for, crafting a story whose setting, characters, and sensations evoke a sense of uncanny familiarity ... The storied world that makes up Jones’s haunted West is complex and multilayered, creating a verisimilitude woefully lacking in the romanticized and exotic fables of B-horror and pulp Westerns ... Jones reinforces the context of these details through an intricate layering of motives and historical effects to build a story that highlights the insidious impacts of colonialism. These repercussions are portrayed as both an external force and internalized hegemonic effect, serving as a source of horror and ghoulish tropes ... Sometimes when you read a story the scenes and images are presented so vividly it almost feels like they might fall from the page if the angle of the book tilts too high ... Jones’s unique take on the slasher succeeds in terrifying readers while giving heart to a narrative that will leave readers wondering where history ends and storytelling begins, and maybe even to question whether these narrative forms can ever be cleaved from one another, or should be.
