Rick Riordan's Reviews > The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

I inhaled this book in a few days, which is very fast for me. It's a propulsive horror historical centered around a -- well, I'll use the term "vampire," though the author goes to great lengths not to use that term for good reasons. There are chills and scares aplenty, but it's much more than just a horror novel, as vampirism is used to explore themes of identity, guilt, revenge, forgiveness and memory in the context of the history of the American West, specifically the genocide against the Pikuni (Blackfeet) in the 1870s in what would become Montana. It's a terrifying story, told in a terrifying way.

We're presented with a double frame narrative. In 2013, Etsy Beaucarne is notified that a manuscript has been recovered written by her 'greatest'-grandfather, Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran minister who disappeared in 1912. Etsy, an academic who hopes this find might mean one last chance to gain tenure at her university, begins to read . . .

Within this manuscript, we read Arthur's story in 1912, in the days just before his disappearance. We learn that he has a dark, guilty history he is not sharing with us, from the days before he became a preacher. He has also begun to receive visits from a Blackfeet man named Good Stab (among other names) who says he wants to confess something. Over the days when Arthur is hearing this increasingly bizarre confession, people in the town start turning up dead . . .

And within Arthur's story, we hear the words of Good Stab, who takes us back to the 1870s, when he says he died and became something other than a man.

These three narratives wrap around one another, seeping together like spilled blood, until we realize that the past is never past. It is real. It is deadly. And it will affect Etsy in 2013 just as much as it affected Good Stab in 1870.

Mysteries upon mysteries keep the pages turning. The beautiful, poignant details of Pikuni culture and lore are rendered with a perfect storyteller's sense of pacing. All the characters come across as fully dimensional humans, flawed but sympathetic but at times horrific. The ending is as strange as a fever dream, but also perfect and unexpected.

One bit of vampire lore I particularly loved (minor spoiler here) is that a vampire becomes what he eats. If he feasts on deer, he eventually started to look and think like one, even growing antlers. If he takes European settlers, he takes on their facial hair, their coloration, even their eye color. To remain a Native, Good Stab must drink the blood of Natives, preferably and tragically his own people the Pikuni. This raises all sorts of interesting questions about the nature of cultural memory and loss. If the only way to remain what you are is to destroy what you are, what do you do? What can you do?

Loved the book through and through, though I admit I will be looking over my shoulder in the dark for some time to come, hoping that Good Stab isn't standing behind me.