The Marci Rating System

Purrcy had stretched up to look out the window & chitter his teeth at a bird that had been teasing him, *personally*, by flitting around the porch looking for spider eggs & frozen insects. But then! It flew to another window!



Purrcy has a very pink NOSE and set of TOEBEANS. For your edification and comfort.

---

I avoided reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones for a long time because I don't really read or watch horror, it's usually too scary for me.* As we got into the yearly-roundup, what-did-I-miss, pre-Hugo nominations part of my reading cycle, it was showing up on too many lists for me to ignore it any longer, so I buckled up and took the plunge.

All the lists are right. It IS that good, great even. It's structured as a mostly-epistolary story, with an outer 1st-person narration by Etsy Beaucarne, a present-day white woman Communications Prof who's transcribing letters and diary entries written by her ancestor Arthur Beaucarne in 1912. Many of the diary entries transcribe a set of interviews with a Piegan Blackfoot Indian vampire, Good Stab. (Yes, I saw what Jones did there, with interviewing a vampire. I'm sure he meant to do it.) Some of the horror is vampire-related horror, but a fair bit is historical horror, especially related to the Marias Massacre.

For me, a wimp about horror, the epistolary form & the interview within it gave me enough insulation that I could read without being overwhelmed. (The lack of insulation is why visual horror is pretty much always a no-go for me, it gets too far into my brain & won't get out.) I think Jones used this structure to ease the (presumptive) white reader, though tougher than me, into the Indian POV. First we have the present-day white POV, then a blatantly racist, foolish past white POV we can easily treat as an unreliable narrator**, which makes the reader work to figure out what really happened with Good Stab, as we get his story filtered through Arthur. And because we the readers have to do so much work to piece the story together, it acts as an enthymeme: a story or argument that's more persuasive because the audience has connected some of the dots themselves.

I started to write more, but deleted it because so much of the pleasure of a book like this comes from connecting the dots yourself, from following the author's clues to get a picture of their world- (& monster-) building.

I haven't seen "Sinners" (Too Scary For Me), but the parallels are interesting. Was there something in the air? Is there something about vampires, that makes them the ideal metaphor?

---

*e.g. reviews of Jones' previous book, The Only Good Indians, make me pretty sure it's Too Scary For Timid Me.

** this is a *really hard sell*, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I consider Lolita to be fundamentally a failure as a work of literary communication, because Nabokov didn't realize how many readers would never stop identifying with Humbert.