Etsy Beaucarne is an academic who needs to get published. So when a journal written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor and her grandfather, is discovered within a wall during renovations, she sees her chance. She can uncover the lost secrets of her family, and get tenure.
As she researches, she comes to learn of her grandfather, and a Blackfeet called Good Stab, who came to Arthur to share the story of his extraordinary life. The journals detail a slow massacre, a chain of events charting the history of Montana state as it formed. A cycle of violence that leads all the way back to 217 Blackfeet murdered in the snow.
___________
A blood-soaked and unflinching saga of the violence of colonial America, a revenge story like no other, and the chilling reinvention of vampire lore from the master of horror. This is the third Stephen Graham Jones novel I have read, all clever twists on horror, full of unique takes on familiar tropes, tapping into an atavistic dread, a creeping uneasiness which then explodes into full-blown bloody terror. Yet the strongest thread in each of the stories is the treatment of the Native American tribes, both historically and their place in America today.
The story is told from three POVs - that of Etsy Beaucarne, a struggling academic who begins to study the journal of her grandfather; Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor, the author of those journals, initially perhaps sympathetic but who hides a terrible secret; and Good Stab, a Blackfeet, whose story Arthur's journal alternately records and comments on. As Good Stab's story develops it is clear that Beaucamp does not believe it; it becomes equally clear that Good Stab has been afflicted with vampirism, and that Arthur Beaucamp is not a listener chosen at random.
The horror, at least the fantastical elements, are introduced slowly, but the horror of the treatment of the Blackfeet, of the systematic extermination of the buffalo, on which their existence depends, is clear from the start of Good Stab's narrative.
The physical, and mental, transformations that Good Stab experiences as he feeds on, and takes on the characteristics of, his prey is a metaphor for the attempts to force the tribes, at least those who had not been slaughtered, to assimilate by forcing 'Christian values' on the young, ripped from their traditional lives.
There are no real heroes in THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER, all the characters are flawed. The book is horrifying, incredibly entertaining, and intensely moving. For all the skill with which Stephen Graham Jones builds his world and creates his uniquely terrifying take on the vampire myth, the real horror is the genocide perpetrated by the Europeans on the Native American peoples.
No comments:
Post a Comment