[A] masterpiece ... Throughout his career, Jones has been delivering unique stories that exist in and around horror ... I said this is Stephen Graham Jones' masterpiece because the prose is gorgeous and the plot is complex, engaging, and multilayered, but we have seen these elements from him before. Maybe I should say this is the novel in which Jones does all the things he does but even better than before.
[A] gruesome joyride ... What is Jones doing here, with this trifold narrative structure? He has created a novel that invites us to reflect on how the stories we tell about ourselves can be at once confessions and concealments. At the same time, he’s using this framework to set up some scary, big reveals.
Within 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.
A riveting story of heartbreak, death, and revenge, this remarkable work of American fiction, a thought-provoking tale filled with existential terror, unease, and a high body count, transforms, in Jones’ deft hands, from the unapologetic horror novel it most certainly is into a critique of the entire idea of the United States—a critique that, despite the horrors, both real and supernatural, is forcefully infused with both heart and hope.
