HOLY SHIT! Settle in and don’t tremble too hard. This is a horrifyingly rich, gory, slow burn revenge story - featuring a Native vampire. 

In 2012, a struggling professor is called in to receive an old diary that once belonged to one of her ancestors. Hopeful for something intriguing to write about to achieve tenure, she dives in.

The journal opens in 1912, as Lutheran pastor Arthur witnesses a series of strange deaths. Mixed in with his ruminations are transcribed interviews with a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, who visits him weekly and shares bits of his life as confession. 

But Good Stab claims to be more than human, and his story continues, he begins to unravel a series of horrors going back years and years to a horrific Blackfeet massacre. 

This is a very slow burn, similar to the rest of SGJ’s books. You really sink your teeth (haha) into these characters, seeing them process moments that are seemingly mundane. But every scene gives you so much more insight. It usually takes me a minute to get fully into his books, but once I do it’s hard to remember that the characters are fiction and hard to disconnect them from my own mind and skin. 

The tension is agonizing, and whether or not you’re thrown by certain twists or you’ve put the pieces together, you’ll most definitely be anxious. The last 30% might have been my all-time favorite Stephen Graham Jones conclusion. I couldn’t look away during that final stretch.

The most challenging part of this book is getting situated with the language. I can’t speak to how accurate the 1912 dialogue is (and according to the author’s note the Lutheran aspects are a bit improvised), but it FELT authentic. And that made it a bit difficult to follow at times. The Good Stab transcripts were a little bit easier than the Arthur entries, but honestly I had to reread several paragraphs from both sections several times to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and that I understood the action that just went down. I think the book is absolutely worth it, but I can understand folks getting frustrated or confused and not wanting to push through.

So we get exact transcripts (though Arthur struggles with some of his vocab) of Good Stab’s interviews, and then free-flowing Arthur journal entries. Good Stab is very deliberate and consistent, playing with his language and making Arthur uneasier and uneasier. And the fascinating part is watching Arthur’s writing morph as Good Stab has more and more of an impact and his words wriggle into his head. It’s an excellent game of cat and mouse to witness.

This is a revenge story, and the Good Stab’s actions are fictional and supernatural (and maybe a little cathartic), but the actions of colonizers that incited this revenge are very real. If you haven’t heard of the Marias Massacre, look it up before you read to have a fuller understanding of the true horrors depicted here. (The mass killings of buffalo are of course true as well.)

The gore is gory! I don’t even know if I need to warn you, but maybe if you’re a first time SGJ reader I ought to. He never holds back. There are terrible deaths of both humans and animals, and torture and violence that go beyond death, and detailed body horror, and just a lot of grief and pain. 

There is rich symbolism in all the horror here. There are questions around guilt and responsibility and family legacy. This is a book that throws the weight of history at you and forces you to sit with it, lingering in its trauma.

It is very, very clever. It’s horrible and gruesome and visceral and soul-crushingly devastating. It’s sometimes funny (really!). It is a lone, furious more-than-a-man against colonization, false justice and rights, callous ravagers of land, men hiding behind faith and absolution, and violence that means nothing to them. And meanwhile he is alone in his fight, grieving and forever separated from his people and his home.

READ IT.

CW: murder, death (child/parent), animal cruelty/death, genocide, violence, gore, body horror, blood, torture, injury, fire, rape, racism, gun violence, cannibalism, suicide, war, grief, alcoholism, vomit, religious bigotry, mass shooting

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(I received an advance reader copy of this book; this is my honest review.)