**spoiler alert** It is important to note that most of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, tou**spoiler alert** It is important to note that most of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, touches on these topics as well. Many people might find the book's subject matter & those detailed in my review overwhelming. I suggest you steer clear of both if this is the case. Please note that from this point forward I will be writing about matters that contain reflections on the sexual abuse of a minor, genocide, graphic physical violence, gore, the death of a child, & others.
My mind weaves the spider’s web, over & under each proposed thought & speckled insight; the mind in my skull wanders like the Arachnid sauntering silently over its weaved domain. With no fear in my heart to nurture the dormant tale of the night wanderer, I harboured an apprehension that what the besmirched legend of new-age awards would pen, might insight anything other than a perturbed annoyance in me.
The author’s work has been met by my reading twang-fingers before & each time I toss the flame-burning birch into the pile where ravenous wolves confound my irritated stance; so different from the grovelling Samuel they lurch to devour.
I find myself writing with a sentiment that nestles closely to anger. I cannot necessarily blame anyone for this feeling; I knew upon choosing this book that I was playing a losing game. Jones� books have not been written with me in mind. Although we both foster a flame for the hawk who pinches our baby-skinned necks as we saunter through the lore of a people that intertwine us like the grooves on Great Turtle’s back. So has the owl loomed over my shoulder as I gritted my teeth, waiting for the pounce of the terror promised in this plot, to shock me into a basement of my secrets like the lone Pikuni after the genocide of his people.
Reading this book felt like a flamboyant barrack of frosted rot. Presenting readers with the immemorial tale of the massacre against the Blackfeet, namely the Massacre of the Marias River (1870), Jones approaches the historical turmoil of the elongated destruction of colonialism on Turtle Island through the lens of hope that is fostered within the community by its mere persistence in this life.
His story, as weaved through the saturated soil where bloodshed galvanizes the imbecilic radiant racism of the protruding emptiness of the colonizer’s soul, intentions discussions that present themselves in the exchanges of modern kin & those who choose to reflect on history as a monosyllabic reality rather than the cornerstone of the villainy that seethes in the hearts of humanity.
In essence, this story is about a vampire seeking vengeance for his community, directly extinguishing the genealogy of Arthur Beaucarne’s lineage, having been the man who made the call to massacre a Pikuni Tribe.
The vampire, Good Shot, becomes immortal after encountering, by chance, the caravan of American colonialists transporting a caged vampire—though this was not made deliberately clear with words, Good Shot & his company recognize the caged man to be different than them, this not due only to his ashen skin & eye colour.
What ensues is a literary reflection on the impacts of a single decision & ways in which resistance is fostered in the community of those who vanquish the putrid flesh of the impacts of colonialism, racially motivated violence, & old fashion derogatory ignorance.
The story itself is one that I am glad to see written. In truth, although the introduction of the story, led by Betsy (“Etsy�) Beaucarne, left me riddled with disgust, I read to review in its entirety, the tale that utilizes the gruesome genocide of Indigenous communities, such as the Blackfeet, to peruse the antiquated tale of the vampire.
I reassure you here, that this is not meant to be a statement drenched in condescension rather, having read a few reviews by casual readers & dedicated fans of Jones� I found myself seated with a bit of confusion. Ample readers stated blindly how wonderfully horrific the story was; I won’t begrudge them this as, for some readers, it is enough to taunt the membrane of the horrors done to the “Savages� in the West, to drive home how otherworldly the genre can be.
In other cases, readers disliked the book because of the overt Indigenous lens that was adopted; the ample use of Pikuni vernacular & the tedium of a story that is told in morsels.
This leads me to the sentiment I foster now. To view the Massacre of Marias River as an isolated opportunity, as does Arthur Beaucarne, one that needed to be done to set in motion the “New World,� one might find that the sorrow of the death of the collective tribe does not mean as much as if one’s mother died.
I suppose if one eagerly pretends to forget the reasons we are here today, this practice of personal investment, only insofar as the event is personally directed, might save one an awful lot of tears. Yet, does Jones not write in order to advocate the distrust one fosters in oneself when revealing Oz to the travellers?
The intentional overhunting of the Buffalo is a story well-known to me. All the way north, the secrets that shall never know the letter’s formation, frown as the common mongrel seethes the same racism that the Lutheran Paster does to Good Shot, the same dialogue that was tired before it left the hollow kind that invented it.
The interwoven truth of the existence of the horror that is broadcast within this book gave me pause. Jones writes from both perspectives in a way that allows the reader to feel inclined to side with either character—especially if one is weak in constitution. To pinpoint a singular instance, Etsy asks herself whether Arthur is a good or bad man. This seems like a stupidly odd question, knowing as one does that Arthur actively participated in the genocide of the Pikuni. Why, then, would she need to ask this at all?
Etsy has been primed to analyze a situation on which she has been given more than enough information & yet instead of approaching it with any rational thought, she engages in the lousiest rambling I have ever encountered. It is unfortunate to note that Etsy is the reason I found this book so abysmal.
Her sections were penned in such a dastardly way that I was shocked to find that she was forty-two years old. Here begin my complaints about the book; many authors believe themselves able to write stories in a journalistic fashion, employing a first-person point of view in which the entire story is told via the written word of the character. This seldom works.
Although there are parts of this book that did not atrociously fail as journal entries—namely that they were believable recounts by someone who had ample time to write in detail; the majority of this book did not function well in this format.
Etsy is unable to write, point blank. Her sections are poorly crafted & read as immersive soliloquies, & although I can appreciate that the author might have been aiming for the character to read as trite & mentally deranged in her deep-rooted insecurity, this made a joke of the horror that Jones had spent 450 pages crafting.
As the story opens, Etsy rambles as though the person reading her words cares a lick about her or her thoughts. To see the story end with her journal entries, which never hit the mark, always teetering into insanity since no one writes the way that Etsy does, not even an AI-reliant tween, the conclusion felt like a satirical take on the Animorphs series, during which her narration added a lyrically sour note to every word she wrote.
Throughout the story, one may note aspects that ring truer than others, such as Arthur’s intense reliance on God’s salvation or the savage disregard of a person he does not care to understand. So intentional were these sections in crafting the racist idiocy of this character that I found myself paying close attention to moments when he would slip up, so that his peeving questions, his hesitations when believing Good Shot’s tale, could be met with the truth he loathed welcoming, ironically via the hands he holds to the God who watches both himself & the peoples of the Land.
A few instances left their mark, such as the linguistic families that Arthur’s lineage confused. This was compounded for me when Arthur referenced Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra� (1883), a book that was only published in English, in the United States in 1891. Leading me to wonder whether he would have had the opportunity to read the philosophy at all, given publishing & literary trends in the West during this century. Arthur’s character was a bit of an enigma.
At times, he references Germany as “the old country� which might lead a person to believe that he was born there, however, based on his lack of linguistic diversity, namely that he could read German but could not understand it spoken—as when Etsy spoke to him in his rodent form�; & that he could not understand, write, or read French—a language that was commonly learnt across all of Europe during the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries—he was most probably born in the United States.
I draw the eye to an error in the French sentence written by Arthur. I might also attribute this to an error by the print or publisher. Regardless, the lack of diversity in his education, reinforced by his failure to reference Latin—the language most commonly used by leaders of any church denomination—highlights his simple-mindedness & thereby his Animorphed form of the dune scrambler, one worthy of his inner demon.
I do not drive this point home to be cruel to readers who do not have the abilities or education I note Arthur could not have had either. Rather, I note this here because Arthur references a book in an attempt to sound intelligent, in fact doing the complete opposite. I wonder whether the author read this book as I have & feels similarly about the baboonery written masochism that is Nietzsche’s philosophy in this volume.
It is perhaps ironic that Arthur references a German author when he is unable to connect with the language or the culture, having lived his entire life away from the State which referenced Nietzsche’s work to advocate for its Aryan ideologies. Rather, perhaps ironic is not the appropriate word, as Arthur has advocated for just such a revolution of state in the country in which he stuffs his gastronomically depraved visage until he too, like the vampire after a feed, needs to lay down still & quiet.
Time & again, I found myself wondering about Arthur & what kind of turd for brains wonders about the ability of the Indigenous population to know about cats; a species that has existed on the continent since the fiftieth century. However, I digress.
Jones understood Arthur’s role in the story & although I wished for his demise from the first, the book took its time getting to the predictable reveal. I pause here to note that, for readers who simply read a book without questions or doubts, the pacing of this tale will satisfy their curiosities & quench the thirst for knowledge they haven’t yet sought to fill.
Upon closer look, one will note that the linguistic profile of the majority of the characters was off, leading one to question how much depth the author wished to attribute to his tale. Arthur, the man of the rodent variety, used clipped words when writing, rather than spelling them out in their entirety & relied on modern sentence structuring to get his points across.
One notes the same thing for the Cat Man, who spoke like the bully in a 90s sitcom, never actually speaking like the Eastern European man one is led to believe he is—based on Good Shot’s description of his accent. This bummed me out. There is something to be said about keeping pace with the format one would use to distinguish the time in which the events took place. As annoying as Etsy was, her writing was true to a chronically online loner who found the quirky humour of YouTube personalities the epitome of comedy.
By this stage in the review, I find that my energy is spent. Reading this book felt like a waiting game, with the reader poised to hope that there was a third option; that perhaps the characters wouldn’t choose the most predictable action.
When Good Shot sacrificed a child, one hoped that he had more insight than to simply allow the beast from a strange land to live, but, he forgot who he was & therefore, the demon lives on. I suppose here one notes the discourse that persists today; if one had the choice, would one have burned down the boats? Would one have felt happy to know that Arthur’s family perished in the fire of a thousand rodent bodies? When is it justifiable to murder?
This is not a question I will endeavour to answer in this review. Humanity has exhibited its beliefs, ad nauseam, on the subject. Had the boats been burned, there existed still a land filled with people who wanted to extinguish the “Indian�. The first Prime Minister of Canada, reinforcer of the Indian Residential School, wished to “kill the Indian in the child� to exterminate all Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island. Extremist as his alcoholic rambling sentiments are viewed as being by modern hearts, the ignorance of his bigotry persists in the systems that adhere to the principle that Indigenous Peoples are lesser & cannot be but fools of the plains.
For readers who have no understanding of the permeating effects of genocide in North America, this story will come as a cruel shock that the home they so cherish as bold & free is also the nesting ground for a festering bigotry. I should hope that their pride in being different than their forefathers does not end upon the final page turn. For readers of the more informed variety, & perhaps even those who wish to tremor & toil in terror, this book will not offer them what they long to find.
Jones� story, though hinting at the horrors of genocide, & mass murder with casual intent, brutality, & racism, does not delve into the minutiae of these realities, ever fantastical does the lore of the eternal flame of blood ooze into the plot.
In some sense, this book’s focus lies primarily on the narrative of blood quantum & identity politics, reminding readers that a person is who they are, regardless of their eye colour or height. Yet, through the branches of the tree of life, we find reminders of the people who came before us, the colour that we carry from their palms to ours.
If we forget who came before us, can we mourn the absence of a dawn we’ve been robbed to see rise? When sitting with this question, I acknowledge that a paper of this length is not long enough to riddle the themes of this book. For this, I am grateful to Jones for endeavouring to brighten the darkness in which most horror has been left to rot. Within the sunlight of the current day, one notes that much of the eternal plight of despair flowers in the hearts of those for whom ignorance & apathy are elements of pride.
Ultimately, I wished for more from this book. I wanted more of the brutal reality of these experiences to be cast onto the pages; for the reader & the soul of the wandering to meet in this moment unable to sever each other from the history that beseeches humanity’s pendulum. I can appreciate that for a granddaughter, the horrors committed in such a time & place as 1870 might feel so long ago as to be inconsequential, yet, I would beseech her to remember that I am someone’s granddaughter too.
Good Shot’s ability to become The Fullblood for his people, remaining attentive to the land that gave him strength & hope, insights this story with a light that overpowers the snuffed candles of the church. The darkening terror of his eternal life might yet grant him a lessening of the bundle he carries in his blackened heart, one that no longer recognizes the vibrancy of human existence.
Although I chuckle at the idea that someone who cannot stand the light of a candle might sit & stare eyes-wide at a computer screen, I laugh too at the terrible circumstances of a world that cannot understand itself. The white nestled caw of a lung underground, singing a tune humming through the soil, reminds me of the background that fades away.
Ever cold is the day spent in nostalgic despair. As Arthur wanders into the woods, acknowledging that his piousness will not suffice to snuff out the villainy of his person, so too does the reader remember the complexity of a person they will never know.
I find it humbling to recall the eternal nature of human love. Overcast clouds & raindrops on roses never falter in their course down to earth. As Good Shot holds his memories dearly, palms to earth, I too find my warmth in the casualty of this life where so many before existed as victims of a pilgrimage older than the vampire itself....more
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