That didn’t seem interesting to me. I wanted someone to come at them when they were collected together at night around a campfire, and so a vampire just made sense. Something that can attack at night, something that’s power is going to be useful at night. I think that’s kind of where it started for me.
Paste: Your vampire, Good Stab, has a lot of interesting vampiric traits. Did they emerge as required by the plot, or did they come naturally to the character?
Jones: The two main divergences from conventional vampire lore with Good Stab is that number one, he starts to resemble that which he feeds upon regularly. The other one is that, once he starts feeding on something or someone, he cannot stop until there’s no more left in there. Those are the two things. The first one I did have in my head somehow, that he was going to, I wanted him to grow the nubs of horns [when he fed on elk or buffalo]. That’s basically what it was.
I didn’t know it was going to become the important plot thing it became, but I just thought it’d be really cool if he had nubs of horns. That’d be disconcerting. He is not only losing his humanity, he’s becoming an animal. That was really fun to think about, and it was a really fun [constraint] on his victim pool too, really. Before he figured out that he resembles what he feeds upon, or you are what you eat, everything in the world that had blood was potentially his food. Now, if he wants to retain his identity as a Blackfeet, he’s got to feed on Blackfeet. That’s terrible.
I never want vampirism to be like a superpower. I always want it to be a curse and I always want there to be a high price for it. That’s really important for me, and it’s really important that the creature has those clamps around it, such that it has to try to figure out how to live in a very tight, confined, rule-bound space.
The other one that he has to feed until his side bursts open, if he drinks too much blood, that came about organically. I wanted his hunger to be more important than his own self-preservation instincts, basically. That builds him in a way in which he’s always a puppet to his hunger, I think. I like that.
Paste: The book has this nested structure, and it occurred to me that, through Arthur and Etsy, you’re essentially filtering Good Stab’s story through two different generations of white people. Was that something you realized you were doing from the beginning, and what was the importance of that in the narrative?
Jones: Yeah, it was intentional and what I’m trying to, I don’t know, engage with or poke fun at, one of those two, is the way that [1932 book] Black Elk Speaks got down on the page. Because the way Black Elk Speaks got on the page is John G. Neihardt, this kind of ethno-enthusiast, proto-anthropologist kind of guy, went to the Lakota, went to this guy, Black Elk, and he said, ‘Tell me your story.’
The issue was Black Elk spoke Lakota; Neihardt didn’t speak Lakota. They sat around a fire in a lodge, and Black Elk recounted his life story to an interpreter who knew both languages, and that person translated it into English. I’m sure [he] lost 60 percent of the story right there [trying] to translate between languages on the fly like that. Then he was telling the story to John G. Neihardt, who was just sitting there, listening, while his son or daughter, I forget which one, sat beside him and recorded it all down.
There’s a lot lost in that transmission from the translated stuff being told to someone, trying to write it down fast enough and capture the character and the flavor and all that stuff. Then John G. Neihardt took that, produced that textual recording, and wrote a book out of that. Who knows what Black Elk was saying? We will never know what Black Elk was saying. There was a big crush of “as told to” biographies from a lot of these Indian people who lived in the late 19th century.
In the early 20th century, they were telling their stories to different people and they were getting recorded, but who knows what was really being passed on? We will never know how it was prettied up, how it was shaped to meet the needs of the audience, how it was shaped to meet the political context of the time. Who knows?
There may be some of that going on here, but my favorite single thing in narratives is indeterminacy. I love it when the ground beneath my readerly feet becomes unstable. In this story, the way I could make it unstable was to nest it like that, where each layer where it goes up to get to our eyes, to our mind, to our hearts, is another possible intrusion of corruption.
Paste: This brings me to a question about the language because you have three very different voices here. Good Stab sounds like Good Stab in a very particular way and uses a lot of indigenous terminology to refer to animals and people. Arthur sounds like a guy who lived in the West in 1912. What was the research process like to sort of pin down what they should sound like?
Jones: The research process for Good Stab was twofold. The first part was reading and taking a lot of notes on James Welch’s novel Fools Crow from 1986, where a character speaks roughly in the same diction that Good Stab speaks. James Welch is the Blackfeet novelist. I’ll always be like Blackfeet novelist number two or three or something, but he’ll always be number one. He was the one who was doing it back when it really, really … I think it probably meant more back when he was doing it, because it was harder to do it back then.
That was the first part of it. It’s not just about getting the terminology. It’s not about vocabulary necessarily. Vocabulary is how it is expressed at the surface. Good Stab’s voice is more about… He had a completely non-Western way of thinking. To him, the spiritual aspects of the world were as real as the trees, the elk, and everything. That’s a completely alien, non-Western 2025 way to think.
It was really hard to make my mind shift into that space where none of that stuff was critically engaged with, which I don’t mean to say that he’s childlike or anything like that. It’s just he never had a need to think like we think. The way he thought was perfectly fine, and it made him move through stories differently. Also, having grown up in the oral tradition himself, he tells stories in a different way than Arthur does. He presumes engagement by the audience, and he can do gestures and stuff. That’s why, in parts of his recounting, he’ll say, “And then I put my hand like this,” and the reader can’t see how he’s putting his hand. Arthur can see it. Arthur isn’t recording that. He’s just recording the words.
Good Stab was fun, he was tricky, but Arthur was the easiest. I probably shouldn’t say this, but Arthur’s [got an] encrusted, antique kind of fake Baroque, wannabe [H.P.] Lovecraft voice. When I say Lovecraft, I mean someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing, but they try to cover that up with vocabulary. That’s Arthur. He was matriculated in the Victorian era, and his education and his thinking is always locked into that era.
He is writing in 1912, but who he is on the page kind of came of age, I would say, probably in 1868 or somewhere around there. He’s a relic of a former era, but that weird, stupid way he talks or writes, that’s how I think in my head. I’ve only got to do that voice twice before, once in Ledfeather, which is also somewhat epistolary, and another time in a short story [in] Clarkesworld called “Captain’s Lament.”
That way of shading language, such that all the words are like 80 percent right, but also in a fun way, 20 percent wrong, and a little bit made up besides, that is to me, endlessly productive and fun. If I could write all my novels in Arthur’s voice, that’s what I would do, but I don’t think people are going to tolerate that, so I just get to do it every once in a while.
Paste: Early in the book, Arthur prefaces listening to Good Stab’s story by saying ‘I listen with a good heart.’ I wonder if, for you, that was an effort to to engage with not just historically the way that white people engage with Indigenous stories, but the way that white readers now engage with stories about Indigenous characters?
Jones: That’s a good point. No, if it was in my mind, I’ve forgotten it, but I don’t think it was. I like that reading of it, though, because people do position themselves differently to Native works. The first time that happened to me, in 1995, I was working on my Master’s at North Texas in Denton, and all my stories, to me, featured Native characters, usually as protagonists, but I had never actually said that. I assumed it.
Then finally, I had a story where one character asked another, the main character, and they said, ‘Why are you so dark,’ or something or whatever they said. Then he said, ‘I’m Blackfeet, or I’m Indian.’ I came to the workshop to get dragged across the coals about this story, and everyone had positioned themselves differently to it. They had a look on their faces, a tone in their voice, a different way of sitting in their seats that signaled that ‘We’re in sacred space now. Oh, we’re dealing with Indian material. Let’s talk seriously about this. This is not meant to be fun. This is meant to matter.’
I was like, “This is crazy. I do not like this, because I just want to have fun.” Ever since then, I’ve been really conscious of how the audience is conditioned to position themselves in relation to Indigenous stories. Therefore, I think I’ve probably developed a little, I don’t know, satellite system of deflection methods to try to make them more comfortable and nudge them out of a sacred space. I remember reading years ago, someone was talking about, they said, ‘When I teach Leslie Marmon Silko’ or whoever it is, ‘the first thing we do is we all go out of the building and sit under a tree, and just sit there for 10 minutes and listen to the leaves sigh.’
I remember that, it makes me shudder just thinking about that. I can’t imagine [that with] one of my books. I’m not saying the outside is bad. Anywhere is good to be, but just this idea that Native lit exists in a sacred space, that’s just one step away from the noble savage, the stoic Indian, all that stuff. It’s dangerous territory. I understand that I’m definitely walking the line between it with this book, between that and some fun space, but hopefully, it’s productive in some way.
Paste Magazine: I want to go back to the concept of Good Stab hunting in such a way that he must feed on his own people in order to continue to be one of them. How did that become such a crucial part of the novel?
Jones: I wanted to really resist the idea that as much as he might try to tell his story such that he’s a vigilante for his nation, for his tribe, for his people, he’s nevertheless still his people’s boogeyman. It’s my job as a horror novelist to always put my characters in the worst bind I can think of.
For Good Stab, I guess maybe part of understanding this is tribal people, not just indigenous people, but all over the world, people who are still tribal, as far as I’ve read and know, their sense of self is transpersonal. It’s, “I’m just a member of this tribe.” The tribe is the organism rather than like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Success in Cuckoo’s Nest is rising above the crowd and saying, “I’m different.” That’s not the case in tribal societies.
Tribal societies are all about helping the tribe make winter camp, helping the tribe get meat, being productive in that way, which is to say that’s what’s most important to Good Stab. If that’s what’s most important to him, then that immediately signals to me that is exactly what I have to take away from him.
That’s what I have to dangle out for him to hope to recover. The more dire of a bind you can put your main character in, the longer legs your story has. When the story has longer legs, it can get through that draggy second act so much easier, I think.
Paste Magazine: Vampires are commonly interpreted as metaphors in horror fiction. In writing this book, what did you learn about what you think vampires represent now?
Jones: I think vampires used to be like zombies. They were this blank, metaphoric space we could pour stories into, and inflict it this way or that way to mean this or that. I think in the ’80s, people say vampires were a way for us to process through the AIDS epidemic. Before that, it was a way to kind of talk about tuberculosis. I think none of those are wrong. I usually don’t read stories in that way, but the reason I don’t read them out that way is because it doesn’t help me write better stories.
I don’t need to know how to codify stuff into my stories. I need to know how to make characters and worlds believable, and interesting, and all that stuff. I think where we are now with the vampire, which is exceptional, it’s not like this with the werewolf, it’s not like this with the zombie, but the vampire has been with society, culture, civilization, for enough centuries that it’s quit referring to other things.
I think vampires now just refer to themselves. It’s like the Semioticians say that, what is it? Symbols have an evolutionary life cycle. They go through where it first means this, you look at a triangle, and it sends you to a pyramid, that kind of stuff. There’s a graduation point where suddenly, that triangle only refers to itself. I think that’s where vampires have gotten to. A vampire now refers to itself, and that’s so, so exciting to me.
It’s almost like they’ve become real in every way but the physical. They’re real in all the ways that are important. I think zombies are still a metaphoric space. We use zombies as a backdrop to put humans in a pressure cooker, so we can know humans better, but I think vampires, they’re their own thing, man. They exist independently now, and that’s really, really cool.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is available now wherever books are sold.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.
