[Vampires IX] You Are What You Eat

Gluttony, identity and morality in ‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’

Nosferatu

Welcome to the ninth entry in my series on vampires! You can find all the previous entries (and hopefully some explanation for my endless fascination with the topic) here:

• Part I examines vampires for their allusions to our societal threats and fears

• Part II flips the perspective, exploring how vampire experiences reflect our own

• Part III questions the nature of vampire souls; related to art, redemption and more

• Part IV engages with The God of Endings and its themes of immortality & intervention

• Part V focuses on Let Me In’s recontextualization of the monstrous and our relationships

• Part VI looks at Midnight Mass and its themes of faith, addiction and redemption

• Part VII on personal growth in Nosferatu and Ghost's song "Lachryma"

• Part VIII dedicated to ideas of community and belonging in the film Sinners

Hard to conceive that it’s been almost eight months since that last one, and I’ll admit I believed to an extent that I had exhausted the best of the genre. (Ha.)

Turns out it just took someone shoving it into my hands via a book club, but Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter proved how wrong I was. Spoilers for the book ahead; I can’t recommend it enough if you want to give it a shot (it strongly reminds me of The God of Endings, Midnight Mass and Sinners if that helps)!

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) by Stephen Graham Jones

Three-Persons

There's quite a lot happening in this novel, so as usual I'll be approaching my topic with a fairly narrow scope rather than spending ten minutes explaining the whole thing. At its core, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is about a Blackfoot man named Good Stab and his quest for vengeance in the wake of the brutal historical Marias Massacre. Forty-two years after the event, he darkens the door of a small church led by Three-Persons (a name given him by Good Stab for how the pastor supposedly represents the trinity) to tell his story and confess his crimes.

We see all of these 1912 scenes through Three-Persons' eyes, only getting Good Stab's perspective when he is telling his story. Stephen Graham Jones does a great job of establishing the pastor's perspective and gently lulling the reader into sympathizing with the old man, who walks with a limp, has put alcoholism behind him and constantly reflects on the various food items gifted him by women of his congregation, admitting they are something of an indulgence between him and his faith. It's quite casually delivered, but Jones also establishes Three-Person's fervent belief that Indian Peoples' time has ended, and that the remaining few are well on their way to being either swept aside or absorbed by "civilized" America.

It takes most of the book, but Good Stab eventually extracts Three-Persons' own confession: that he not only participated in, but played a pivotal role in the Marias Massacre. As with the historical record, the reason for the attack boils down to deep-seated, genocidal racism – but I was also struck to the core by how for Three-Persons it was also about food. His entire confession letter is spent rambling about how he wants to get back to headquarters and taste the warm pudding they serve there, ultimately pushing other attacking leaders over the edge by whispering in their ears about this perfect goddamn pudding. But it even continues as he's describing the atrocities; the economical, bullet-saving murders of Blackfeet women and children.

You see, Three-Persons spends the book telling us that he's atoned, that his sins are long behind him. But we've also spent the book watching him smilingly indulge in a savory sausage here, a fruit pie there, while maintaining a worldview that falls all-too-perfectly in line with that held by him and his cohorts the day they committed the Marias Massacre. His gluttony is so clearly intertwined with his crime that it is clear as day to me that he hasn't truly repented or atoned.

And Good Stab clearly agrees, given the reckoning he brings to Three-Persons' door. There's a scene in the burning church, with Three-Persons crucified and the pews filled with Good Stab's victims, which is probably one of the most tense and horrifying I've ever read. Even that isn't the end for our food loving friend, but back to that in a minute.

Reversible jacket cover for the Owlcrate edition of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, art by inkdrunkghoul

Good Stab & The Nachzehrer

At this point you might be wondering, with good reason, what any of this has to do with vampires. Have no fear, for we have arrived.

Good Stab's story opens a day or two before the Marias Massacre, with him being recruited to help hide evidence of an attacked caravan on his people's territory – while they had nothing to do with it, the scene was clearly (badly) staged to look like an Indian attack on the settlers' wagon. Yet amongst the corpses, they find a pale, human-rat-like creature in a cage, the iron bars of which are covered in small wooden crosses. Events transpire; eventually Good Stab lies dead on a hill, his mouth just open enough to capture the down-flowing blood of the incredibly quick and violent "Cat Man" after the creature had been shot in half with a cannon. Much later, Good Stab rises again, hankering for the red stuff.

Again, I lament that I can't go into more of Good Stab's story, which makes up the meat of the novel. What follows are just a few key takeaways from a lot of excellent prose.

The Marias Massacre occurred simultaneously with Good Stab's own death. Alongside the direct destruction of his people (through that and cotemporaneous historical events), Good Stab witnesses the near-extinction of the buffalo perpetrated by hunters who would take the animals' hides and poison the meat with hard-to-detect strychnine. The book's title comes from the fact that Good Stab spends decades hunting down these hunters.

Good Stab's vampirism (not referred to as such until the very end of the book, mind) has a few unique traits:

• Sunlight doesn't burn, but it's extremely bright on his enhanced senses

• He doesn't have super speed or strength, but his normal inhibitions are gone: meaning he can do incredible things, but his bones are likely to break in the process

• Once he starts feeding, he can't stop 'til the person/animal is dead

• The blood physically inflates him, starts spouting through his skin if he drinks too much

• If there is a way for him to fully and permanently die, he doesn't know it

• Over time, he becomes what he eats

It turns out that the Cat Man had been fed only rats by his captors, thereby giving him something of a snout and whiskers and diminishing him to an animal-like intelligence. Good Stab starts off drinking only from deer and elk; he soon feels himself beginning to grow antlers from his skull. When he begins hunting the buffalo hunters, his skin grows paler and he begins growing a reddish-brown beard.

In order to stay Blackfoot (which is how we see him forty years later, talking to Three-Persons), he has to feed on his own people.

Owlcrate cover of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, picture credit to matts_books.and.drams

A significant portion of Good Stab's story encompasses his decade-long struggle against the Cat Man, who it turns out very much survived being shot in half as little more than an animal himself. We learn he is at least 450 years old and that he knows a fair few tricks about his condition – possibly even how to end it – but he doesn't share them with Good Stab. Over the course of their struggle we see the Cat Man take on a monstrous, nearly three-meter-tall antlered form, establish himself as a Blackfoot Chief after draining enough of them, and imprison Good Stab beneath the ice in another deeply horrifying sequence I'll not soon forget.

Eventually – after so so so much torment and requiring a strange narrative choice (once-in-a-generation MacGuffin blood, oh boy) – Good Stab gets the upper hand by trampling the Cat Man with a herd of buffalo, then spends a couple years feeding him a specific type of fish, eventually turning him loose with no memory or apparent hope of regaining human form. Why's getting out of being a fish so much harder than getting out of being a rat? I dunno, but the book presents it as conclusive so we might as well take it as such.

Back to Three-Persons. Did I mention there's a third timeline, in 2012, with his great-great-great-granddaughter? No? Well, she's as surprised as you are, especially when Good Stab turns up with a human-sized prairie dog he claims is her sinful ass of an ancestor. Hell of a fate for our food-loving pastor, especially since he's been unable to keep anything other than rodent blood down for a century.

(Unrelated) Art by Valin Mattheis

Transformation?

I love this book; the way it meaningfully brings together real traumatic history with a fascinating personal vampire story. It's also hard to make gluttony an interesting character flaw, let alone theme of a book, but I think Stephen Graham Jones did it pretty masterfully in this case by having indulgent Three-Persons on one side and vampiric Good Stab on the other.

While things like Vampire: The Masquerade touch on the 'you are what you eat' idea by having your emotional temperament match that of your prey, I really appreciate how far Jones went with having his characters literally transform in body and mind. Though, as folks in the book club brought up, he does utterly gloss over sex/gender in this regard. My personal headcanon is that these vampires are entirely stripped of their sex as in The God of Endings, but it (and the lack of female characters in general) certainly still stands as a glaring omission from the book.

And, obviously, 'you are what you eat' applies to us mortals too. Eat like crap and you'll feel like crap. Watch only Hallmark movies and you might forget that non-white people exist. Read only sci-fi/fantasy and maybe lose the ability to talk to normal people – I wouldn't know a thing about that.

The other vampire book I've been working my way through is The Gilda Stories (1991), so that may well be the foundation of Vampires X at some point in the near future. But I'm also head-over-heels loving Joe Abercrombie's The Devils (2025) right now and that has a fun vampire too, so you never know.

For now, I return to my coffin in order to finish my pneumonia recovery. Thanks for reading and until next time <3