Living in a Story: A Guest Post by Stephen Graham Jones
The bestselling author of The Only Good Indians and I Was a Teenage Slasher returns with a chilling tale of blood, buffalo and revenge. Based on gruesome true events, Jones blends history and horror in a haunting story of vengeance and survival. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jones on writing The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
Hardcover $29.99
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (B&N Exclusive Edition)
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (B&N Exclusive Edition)
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Hardcover $29.99
A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.
A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.
Wish I were one of those writers who could choose what they write. It’d be all Trans-Ams and archery for me, I imagine. Maybe some junkyards and hackysack. But, man, it’s more like I feel a chin resting on my shoulder, a mouth whispering close to my ear, and I know better than to look to the side at what- or whoever this is. With The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, had I looked to the side, the last thing I’d have seen would be a flash of teeth, after which I’d have to realize that I’ve been a blood-bag all along.
Instead, I just face forward as long as the words are pouring into me. If I let them stay too long in my head, in my heart, then they burn their way out—I know to go fast, I mean. It’s survival, right? When you want to live, you do what you have to do, you toe the line, you burn up all the hours you need to, to get this story onto the page. Once it’s finally there and done, you can lean back at last, take a deep breath, and then try to keep moving, because it won’t be too long before you see a shape reflected behind you in the glass door of the post office, and you know you’re not alone. Again. That it’s starting all over.
And you wouldn’t have it any other way. The only other option is the loneliness of not writing, of not living in a story.
Which isn’t to say I want to live in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Good Stab’s Montana, Arthur Beaucarne’s Miles City, Etsy Beacuarne’s spiraling-out-of-control life—those aren’t great places to be.
All the same?
This is where all of us live, too. We live in a world that really has all these Blackfeet dead in the snow. We live in a world full of monsters.
But there’s also story.
That’s the world for me. In that world, I can hear Good Stab speaking like a metronome, his anger dressed up in that steadiness, that implacability. I can watch this Lutheran pastor dawdle from pew to pulpit, mumbling to himself the while, trying to carve meaning from what he considers the frontier. I can see Etsy, that pastor’s descendant, walking through a blizzard, holding a digital recorder up like a lamp against the storm, a mewling there between the gusts, pulling her deeper into the whiteness.
Miles City, Montana is where the largest snowflake ever recorded fell, once upon a bitter afternoon.
That fifteen-inch snowflake is a doily, for me.
I place on it this book, this story, these people who were all standing behind me, whispering what I should say.
Now they can stand behind you.
Just, don’t turn around to them too fast.
It’s the sudden movements that draw blood.
