"I really enjoyed this one. I'm surprised by the lower rating. I thought it was an interesting premise. The pacing was a little slow going at times, and the characters are not all that likeable, but I was still engaged. And there is a twist that made my jaw absolutely drop. I thought there was really interesting commentary on caste, class, and colonialism which did not feel forced at all, and I was fascinated by many of the concepts the author brought to the story. I read the physical book in tandem with the audio which was very helpful with the unfamiliar languages. As far as the "comic" description in the synopsis, that is out of left field in my opinion. The book delivered otherwise. "

"I'm always drawn to books about language and translation, and this is one of the more heartening examples, with a great hook and a lot of insights into British-Pakistani life – even if it never quite lives up to its high-concept potential.

We follow Anisa, an Urdu translator in London who uncovers (without, it has to be said, much difficulty) the existence of a secretive ‘Centre��, where an elite few can gain complete fluency in any foreign language in just ten days…but at a sinister cost. Well, I thought to myself, it would have to be a very sinister cost. And without giving anything away, I can confirm that I would 100 percent go through with everything in this book if it would let me hobnob in Arabic or read Turgenev in the original.

And that's perhaps the biggest problem with The Centre – the revelation about what's really going on is neither surprising nor really off-putting enough to qualify as a sinister twist at all. Siddiqi presents her story in the shape of a thriller, but she seems less interested in the plot than in the underlying themes, and I don't blame her. The book's sensitivity to such things as cultural appropriation, intersectionality, classism, xenophobia, immigration and gender relations is sometimes eye-rollingly shallow, but sometimes, too, surprisingly profound: it runs through all levels of the text. Something is being said about how translation can function as a kind of chauvinism, and if it's not always clear what, precisely, Siddiqi wants to say about this, there is at least some pleasure in being given those raw ingredients and a little space to cook with them ourselves.

A flurry of references to people like Derrida and Carla Lonzi made me wonder if Siddiqi has read Edward Said, since I feel like a lot of the principles of this line of thinking have already been well worked through. But in any case, I'd much rather have this kind of pragmatic English vagueness than, say, the strident certainty of a book like RF Kuang's Babel. And the Britishness of Siddiqi's voice, the rhythms of London existence, trains to Tunbridge Wells, cross-currents back and forth between the UK and South Asia, the vocabulary clustered with goras and keema and lenghas and shaadis �� all of this was very congenial to me, and made reading it a delightful exercise in homesickness."

"I can’t figure out if reading Faulkner �� particularly THIS one �� at the very time of the massive George Floyd protests is hideously inappropriate or exactly the right thing to do. All I knew when I started was that I wanted to give Faulkner another shot. Many years ago I laboured heroically through The Sound and the Fury and I seem to remember I thought it was brilliant, but maybe that was just because I survived it. Then more recently I read As I Lay Dying and that one was great, no equivocation, I loved that one. So �� maybe I’m a Faulkner fan. Let’s see.

Turns out, I’m not.

There are major problems with this novel.

FIRST PROBLEM

The story of Joe Christmas is the main thread here. We get his whole life story. The big thing about Joe is his race - this is the Deep South and the 1920s, after all. He looks like a white guy but he’s been told he has some “Negro�� blood in him. This is just a rumour, no one has any proof. He could and does live in white society without anyone raising an eyebrow. The only way people get to know he might be part black is that he keeps telling them. Knowing he might possibly be “part�� (what part, 5%, 10%? this is never debated) Negro crushes Joe’s life, it drives him crazy. And everyone he obsessively tells reacts as if he’s just ripped off his human facemask to reveal a mass of wriggling tentacles. They rear back in horror, they hiss, they throw him out with great force. It’s like if he sticks around they might catch blackness from him. It’s like there was an especial disgust in finding they were in a room with a part-black guy without realising it.

Reading this in the UK in 2020 is strange, more than strange, it’s virtually incomprehensible. There are around 1.25 million mixed race people in this country. No one bats an eyelid, nobody cares. The only thing people are likely to say is “oh those mixed race kids have such great hair��. Now this is not to say racism doesn’t exist in the UK, far from it. But this horror of racial mixing, of white people being in some way contaminated by black “blood�� (we would call it genes now I guess) is not part of the picture.

So it seems to a modern reader as if Joe Christmas is suffering from an imaginary disease. If he just shut up about it, no one would know. But he can’t. So he suffers horribly. Check this extraordinary passage :

Because the black blood drove him first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him fire it. And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book. Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment.

I mean, WTF?

SECOND PROBLEM

The N word is used liberally on every other page. If that’s going to offend you, steer clear of Light in August. Not only is it used a whole lot, it’s used by the characters in the most offensive way possible.

THIRD PROBLEM

Faulkner thinks us readers have got unlimited patience, so he just doesn’t give a rat’s or any other mammalian ass about moving the story forward. At first you think hey, 100 pages, this is so straightforward, I thought Faulkboy was supposed to be tough. And then everything screeches to a halt while a huge backstory is told in great detail. Then we shoot off on another entirely different story. Then we have to have this person’s tiresome biography, and that character too, and then we jump back to fill in the bit of a part of the story only this newly introduced character was present at. A good example is the very last chapter of this long book �� we get a totally new character introduced right there. Cute.

This stop-start monkey business was like to drive me crazy.

FOURTH PROBLEM

The writing style changes all the time, from chapter to chapter and within chapters. I love this idea, of course, I am a fan of Ulysses, but some of Faulkner’s styles are going to give you the heebyjeebies. He knows what he’s doing, he’s being deliberately difficult, unless he was drunk in charge of a typewriter. He seems to enjoy complication verging on bafflement for its own sake.
Joe Christmas is wondering about the “two creatures�� that seem to inhabit his new lover

Now it would be that still, cold, contained figure of the first phase who, even though lost and damned, remained somehow impervious and impregnable; then it would be the other, the second one, who in furious denial of that impregnability strove to drown in the black abyss of its own creating that physical purity which had been preserved too long now even to be lost.

The neighbours poke about in the ruins of a burned house where a woman died :

So they moiled and clotted, believing that the flames, the blood, the body that had died three years ago and had just now begun to live again, cried out for vengeance, not believing that the rapt infury of the flames and the immobility of the body were both affirmations of an attained bourne beyond the hurt and harm of man.

A guy tiptoes into an old guy’s room to wake him up :

There was a quality of profound and complete surrender in it. Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat. or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death.

Also Faulkner comes up with some really ridiculous similes �� here are eyes like beasts :

She watched him, holding his eyes up to hers like two beasts about to break, as if he knew that when they broke this time he would never catch them, turn them again, and that he himself would be lost.

And his pages and pages of loony old man preacher ravings about God’s abomination (i.e. his grandson) and bitches and whores (i.e. his daughter) sound exactly like somebody’s parody of the florid Bible-soaked nutcases of The South

And he just had to watch and to wait, and he did and it was in the Lord’s good time, for evil to come from evil. And the doctor’s Jezebel come running from her lustful bed, still astink with sin and fear. (etc etc etc)

FIFTH PROBLEM : WHAT FAULKNER DID NOT BELIEVE

Round about the time he was writing this book the Carter Family were recording one of their famous songs, you know the one, it goes

Well there's a dark and a troubled side of life.
There's a bright and a sunny side too.
But if you meet with the darkness and strife,
The sunny side we also may view.

Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,
Keep on the sunny side of life.
It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way,
If we keep on the sunny side of life.

Faulkner did not believe in keeping on the sunny side. No. Not even slightly. This novel is a gigantic miseryfest.

I saw a review that described all of this Southern Gothic genre of literature, including old man Faulkner, as “morose scab picking��. Wow, that’s a little harsh.

AND IN THE END

I mean, the guy can write, he has command and he has immense material and he has a great milieu and all of that going for him. It’s just that three quarters the way through Light in August you may feel that you are going to die. Probably in a bizarre agricultural accident.

BONUS TRACK

his face sweating, his lip lifted upon his clenched and rotting teeth from about which the long sagging of flabby and puttycolored flesh falls away

oh shut up, William"

"Title/Author: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Page Count: 448

Publisher: SAGA Press

Format: Hardcover

Other Books I Enjoyed by This Author: Too many to count!

Affiliate Link:

Release Date: March 18th, 2025

General Genre: Western, Supernatural, Paranormal, Vampires, Historical Fiction

Sub-Genre/Themes: Buffalo hunting, Colonization, racism, oppression, genocide, STOLEN LAND AND RESOURCES, vampires, revenge, justice

Writing Style: Back-and-forth POV, journals, letters

What You Need to Know: A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.

My Reading Experience: Reading Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones was an experience that left me emotionally drained in the best way. There’s no distance between the reader and the protagonist’s suffering; it pulls you in, immersing you in the dark truth of the American West.
“You can’t stop a country from happening.��
“But we were already a Nation.��
.
I’d like to report this book as an actual threat to my feelings. In classic SGJ form, the story took a minute to grab me and pull me in. I was worried there for a second (this happens a lot when I start one of his books). I forget who I am dealing with. There’s a different level of presence and attention I need to bring to a SGJ book. I’m standing at the threshold of this story, this almost 500 pages book and I see Good Stab standing there waiting for me to get my head and my heart in this fucking game.

“With enough blood in me, I can see colors in the night, and I can taste those colors, and hear the roots of trees…��

Oh, I see you. I see the land, I see your people and your resources and your culture. I see your enemy. He’s my enemy too.

I want to share a little warning, this book hurts. It devastated me and the title tells you about what’s happening to the buffalo, so know that going into it but worse than that are the human monsters that are not just hunting buffalo but the people who live alongside the buffalo. It’s painful to read but then the title repeats a word doesn’t it? Someone hunting the hunters and for me, that’s what makes this book so special…the way SGJ reclaims the historical narrative. Horror + Heart. ♥️ I show up for it every time. There’s more I want to say about the way SGJ manipulates vampire lore to serve this story in some unique ways. But it would totally ruin some moments of dead-ass horror and readers need to discover that on their own. I just need to say, SGJ took the undying, immortal body of vampires and put his own fingerprints on that. The same can be said about transformation, how vampires turn others, and some really cool stuff with new identities. It’s all just very tricksy SGJ-stuff that’s really badass.

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.��

Final Recommendation: Readers who show up for the GOOD, good stuff from Dr. Jones will not be disappointed. The expected horror with heart, the historical backdrop and the flipped script giving me those Earthdivers vibes–reclaiming that narrative and telling history from side of Indigenous people endlessly fighting colonization, oppression, persecution, and subjugation from the likes of white patriarchal systems who ravage, destroy, and kill to fill their bottomless coffers.

Comps: The Hunger by Alma Katsu, There There by Tommy Orange, The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, Attack of the 50 ft Indian by SGJ, Never Whistle at Night anthology
"