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This has been on my list for an eternity – since Graham Jones did some panels at a con I attended and talked it up as his about-to-be-released next work, actually – but I’ve only just worked my way down the list to it now. It’s of a piece with most of his other work that I’ve had a chance to read in terms of tone and general areas of interest, and like all of them is really excellent character-focused horror (the very rare case where it being obviously written by a complete nerd for the genre has actually worked out pretty well).

In 2012, a somewhat desperate adjunct professor in Communications Studies is informed that the journals of her ancestor – a Lutheran pastor in Montana, who vanished without a trace just over a century previously – had been discovered in the walls of his old parsonage. Seeing the chance to get a publishable book out of this and so salvage her long-since-stalled academic career, she dives headfirst into the project of transcribing and digitizing them. The vast majority of the book is those journal entries, which are themselves divided between the pastor’s actual diary during the weeks in 1912 when mysterious flayed corpses begin appearing outside of town and – the real meat of the story, really – the confessions of the strange Blackfeet man who begins attending his church and asking to share his credulity-straining story each Sunday. It’s genuinely much less confusing and easier to follow than it sounds.

So this is most obviously a vampire story – according to the acknowledgements it began as basically an exercise in figuring out how Graham Jones would do vampires, if he was going to. The result is very non-traditional – sunlight is painful but not dangerous and most of the other traditional weaknesses never come up at all and they can drink the blood of anything living in a pinch, with consequences – but hardly moreso than half the stories about them which aren’t outright Dracula pastiches end up being. While there’s certainly some time spent on the terror of being hunted and toyed with, this is more a story about the horror of being a vampire than of being attacked by one. Which it manages quite well – the most striking imagery in the whole book for me was the symmetry between the corpses drained of their blood and the skinned carcasses left behind by American buffalo hunters, both now spoiled and poison to anything else which make any slight use from the rest of the body. It’s also something a fun novelty for me to have a vampire who’s neither newly turned nor unfathomably ancient but just, like, an eighty year old who looks like he’s forty.

As said, this is most obviously a vampire story. But at its heart this is at least as much historical fiction about the American colonization of what’s now Montana, as told through the very particular perspectives of a tortured vampire and a gluttonous priest. Good Stab had the misfortune to receive a front row seat to most of the episodes of his people’s conquest and near-genocide, and the systematic destruction of all the material basis of their way of life, without ever being able to do more than lash out and bleed those responsible a bit as they destroy it. I’m hardly an expert here, but the historical settings feel extremely real, and full of little notes and anecdotes that add a lot to the texture of the story. Basically every single character is also just some degree of awful, in the way that early 20th century American settlers in small town Montana are reliably going to be.

The emotional core of the story is, then, less a vampiric horror story in most of the usual ways and more a dark supernatural revenge drama about colonialism and genocide, the protagonist of which just happens to have peculiar dietary restrictions and fangs. Good Stab truthfully suffers less from having to kill to sustain himself or being cursed by the sun than by the spiritual revulsion animals feel towards him, the forced rupture from any sort of participation in the life and culture of his people even as it’s destroyed before his eyes. Which is contrasted sharply with Arthur, who – for all that he’s an elderly eccentric and the butt of quite a few jokes – is a respected pillar of the community until the very end, even as he grows erratic and his mental state obviously deteriorates.

I’ve read (basically by accident) a surprising number of stories about hunger, famine and food recently, so that’s the angle of this that I found most striking. Arthur is the rare character – I can’t really think of any other well-done ones, off-hand – whose fatal flaw really is gluttony. His journal entries are full of loving descriptions of the meals and pastries various parishioners leave for him, and as a young man it was specifically the hunger of being on the march for so long and the dream of a nice pudding which enticed him to enable and cheer on the massacre of hundreds. The contrast to the various indigenous nations left starving as the buffalo were wiped out, or how Good Stab is now only able to eat at all through lethal predation, is never explicitly drawn but it’s clear nonetheless.

If the emotional core of the story is revenge drama – or, if you like, a horror story of the kind where a comfortable old man is damned by sins he thought safely forgotten – it really is excellent. Good Stab and Arthur’s cat-and-mouse game is great, the slowly worsening situation of the town around Arthur gives a real sense of dread, and both of them are excellent unreliable narrators with really distinct voices (and I really do enjoy the fact that Good Stab is clearly consciously playing up how Indian he sounds in his ‘confessions’). Graham Jones’ always does good character work and, while hardly his best, this is no exception.

The modern day (well, 2012-13) framing story that bookends the main narrative is weaker than it by a good margin, unfortunately. Etsy is introduced as a strong and #relatable character, but what we know of her didn’t really cohere with the moral courage and ability for decisive action she suddenly starts displaying in the book’s finale. Which is a shame, because said finale has some of the most viscerally horrific and disgusting imagery in the whole book (I mean this as a compliment) and a clear plot that does resolve the 1912 narrative in a satisfying way. Etsy just didn’t feel like the right person to actually do any of that? It’s purely a matter of taste – whether you like a more hopeful or upbeat ending to these things – but even given that I also think the stronger parting image would have been to end the book a scene or two before it was.

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