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”This I believe is the story of America told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands with a choir of the dead mutely witnessing.��


Powerful, creative, oppressive, horrifying �� The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is all of these things. Its merging of the vampire tale into American Indian lore is fascinating and impressive. Its antihero/monster, Good Stab, is absolutely compelling, and his relating his confessions in Indian idiom is atmospheric and effective. The Lutheran minister to whom he makes his confession is subtly complex and vaguely off putting from the start, with little touches like his casual gluttony pointing to much larger issues, and his secrets and his past, like those of his country, are dark and terrible. And for all the very real and graphic horror introduced in the vampire story, it pales beside the actual history this tale is built around, a history more monstrous than mere imaginings.

But for all its virtues, this was a hard book for me to love. It starts slowly, at a double remove from the main story. And after it picked up, bad pacing and repetition often derailed it again, making it a bit of a slog to work through. And the final section, which jumps forward a hundred years to continue the story with the minister’s great great granddaughter, seemed somehow off kilter with the long tale that came before it. That the story was compelling enough to keep me reading through all these flaws is a testament to how powerful and creative a tale it is.