More than 200 Native Americans are slaughtered in a single day. How does the one left alive get revenge? By becoming a vampire, of course.
I have a hard time rating this book because I didn’t really enjoy most of it, but it’s so well written!
It starts with a modern-day woman receiving a diary that was sent to her because she’s the only living descendant of the Lutheran minister who wrote it in the early days of Montana’s existence as a state.
She starts reading it and quickly becomes absorbed in the story it tells of a Native American man, Good Stab, who keeps showing up at this minister’s church to tell him his origin story. It’s a long story, so it has to be told over the course of several days.
In the meantime, we also get peeks into the rest of the minister’s life: “rescuing” a cat from a whorehouse, receiving gifts of food from local townspeople. We also learn that he became a minister to try to atone for something in his past, but it takes most of the book before we find out what that something is.
In the meantime, we get Good Stab’s story of how he accidentally survived the massacre by being out hunting at the time it occurred. The hunting party came across some white men transporting an animal in a cage. When the animal gets loose, it attacks everyone. Most are killed, but Good Stab suffers a nonlethal bite. Then he begins to experience changes …
I don’t think I knew before starting this book that it was a vampire story, but as soon as Good Stab started feeling sick from being out in the sun too long, I realized what this was, and I was fully on board.
Even so, it was hard for me to get into this book. I loved the parts narrated by the minister and his descendant, but Good Stab’s story was told in the tradition of pre-colonized Native Americans. He talks about time in terms like “six sleeps” and “when Sun Chief is high in the sky.” Even the minister notes this is unusual because Good Stab doesn’t talk like this when they’re conversing. He only uses that language when telling his story.
My guess is it’s a nod to the Native American tradition of storytelling using repetition to ensure stories were accurately passed from one generation to the next without the help of a written language. Since Good Stab lives more than a few generations, maybe he was repeating his own story to himself over the years, practicing for when he finally caught up to the minister.
Having read a lot of vampire novels, I always appreciate an entirely new take on the vampire lore, and this one did not disappoint. The sun doesn’t burn Good Stab, but it does make him sick, so he tends to avoid it. He also had a tendency, at least for a while, to hibernate with a bear in the winters, which is fascinating.
He needs blood to survive. It doesn’t need to be human blood, but over time he literally becomes what he eats. When he hibernates with the bear and lives off the bear’s blood, he ends up looking like a bear.
When he feeds off white men, he looks like a white man.
As a Pikuni man, he longs to be recognized as Pikuni, but he can’t do so without cannibalizing his own tribe, which is quite the predicament.
Good Stab’s story is long and winding and full of violence: violence white men inflicted on the natives, as well as violence he (Good Stab) inflicted on all kinds of people.
This story is a lot of things, but ultimately it’s a horror story with a revenge story as its origin.
SPOILER ALERT!!! The following section contains spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book and you don’t want plot points spoiled for you, stop here.
Good Stab sets out to kill all the men involved in killing his village, and it turns out the Lutheran minister was one of those men. That’s why he left the army and became a minister: to leave the life of violence and bloodshed, and also to try and atone for the violence and bloodshed he inflicted in his past life.
But that’s not good enough for Good Stab, who makes good on his promise to kill the minister’s son and grandson, although he misses a child even the minister didn’t know he had, which is how we end up with the modern-day narrator.
Presumably Good Stab also killed the minister, but since that part of the story was told from the minister’s diary entries, he could hardly have written about his own death after it happened. He does write about being on edge all the time once he realizes Good Stab’s intention.
Once his modern-day descendant finishes reading his diary, Good Stab shows up in her life, too, although he doesn’t kill her. Instead, she takes her ancestor’s diary and all the work she had done to translate and update it and throws it off a cliff, hoping that’ll be enough to satisfy Good Stab, and apparently it is.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that ending. I value history too much to be OK with someone literally throwing it away. On the other hand, I’m glad Good Stab didn’t kill her, and I don’t know what other ending would have been more satisfactory without resulting in her death.
I wish I enjoyed this book more. I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as it deserves. It’s very well written, and it’s clear Stephen Graham Jones did a ton of research for this book. I love how he thought about his version of the vampire and how that played into how Good Stab finally got his revenge on the vampire who turned him into a vampire.