![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Etsy Beaucarne is an academic, who needs to get published. So when a journal, written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor and her grandfather, is discovered within a wall during renovations, she sees her chance. She can uncover the lost secrets of her family, and get tenure.
As she researches, she comes to learn of her grandfather’s life, and the life of a Blackfeet called Good Stab, who came to Arthur to share the story of his extraordinary life. She discovers the journals detail a slow massacre, a chain of events charting the history of Montana state as it formed. A cycle of violence that leads all the way back to 217 Blackfeet murdered in the snow.
A blood-soaked and unflinching saga of the violence of colonial America, a revenge story like no other, and the chilling reinvention of vampire lore from the master of horror.
It’s 16 July 2012.
Etsy Beaucarne is a lecturer in the University of Wyoming’s Communication and Journalism department. Desperate to get tenure, she discontinued her latest application in January after being told that her publications were not up to standard. She knows that this means she needs to get a book published and the perfect opportunity comes when she’s contacted by Lydia Ackerman, the librarian of the University of Montana State’s Special Collection who has recently come into possession of a journal belonging to Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne dated from 1912, which was found hidden in the wall of a church.
As Arthur’s closest living relative (not including her father, who lives in a care facility with dementia), the journal technically belongs to Etsy and Lydia needs Etsy’s agreement to keep it in the Special Collection. Having read the first few pages of the journal, however, Etsy recognises that her great-great-great-grandfather had a way with words and an eye for observation of life in a Montana mining town. The more she reads, the more she realises that there may be enough there to get an academic paper from it, maybe even a book deal, and that certainty grows when Arthur recounts the arrival in his church of a Blackfeet Indian called Good Stab who wants Arthur to take his confession.
Good Stab’s story begins with the discovery by him and two hunting bodies of a strange, figure, being transported by a group of now-dead soldiers in a cage, which manages to escape and attack Good Stab. Over a series of visits he explains to Arthur the transformation that he underwent after the attack and how he came to terms with the same. However both Arthur and Etsy begin to realise that Good Stab’s story really began with the massacre of a Blackfeet tribe by American soldiers, which kick-started a violent search for revenge that’s now tied with a series of disappearances in Arthur’s mining town but which also, inexplicably, seems to be stalking Etsy in 2012 …
Stephen Graham Jones’s award-winning horror novel combines vampire tropes with America’s blood-stained indigenous history to create an original and literary Western revenge tale. Although it took me a while to get into the mannered style of Arthur’s journal, once I did it had me gripped and contrasts neatly with Etsy’s modern narration as she slowly realises that she is also being stalked and Jones breathes new life into old horror elements.
I read this in my capacity as a member of the judging panel for the Best Horror Novel category in the 2026 British Fantasy Society Awards and although Jones is an author who I have been meaning to read for ages following the success of his novel MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW, this is the first book of his that I had read so I came in with no preconceptions.
I very much enjoyed Etsy’s conversational, first person narration and it forms a neat contrast with the more formal, stilted narration from Arthur’s journal. That stilted formality made it difficult for me to get into Arthur’s story at first but it did grow on me as it goes on partly because Jones splits it between Arthur’s account of his life in Miles City and Good Stab’s confession to him, which creates depth and tension, especially as Arthur becomes aware of the disappearances and murders that are slowly affecting the city’s townsfolk.
I thoroughly enjoyed Jones’s take on vampire tropes and the sense of a traditional European horror device being literally and symbolically transplanted to the New World and Good Stab literally and figuratively having to battle the same. The way Good Stab is named and renamed throughout his own account as he comes to terms with what happens to him and to his tribe is very effective as is the fact that even as he recounts Good Stab’s confession, Arthur slowly realises that something else going on. I was less sold on a key revelation towards the end, in part because it relies on a reveal that doesn’t start to come together until the final third of the book and which, for me, needed a tad more foreshadowing than we get. Equally, much as I enjoyed Etsy’s narration and the slowly developing tension as she realises that she herself is also being hunted is well done but the big reveal at the end was a little rushed for me and as such, didn’t land as powerfully as it should have done.
Gripes aside, I think this is a novel that deserves its plaudits. Jones takes all the tropes of the vampire novel and the Western revenge novel and combines them into something original and fascinating by wrapping in the terrible treatment of America’s Indigenous people and the impact on their life and culture. The horror comes from both the violence and the genocide but also the grief that it all creates. It’s a story that’s very much based on human weakness and fear but takes it to its extreme conclusion and it’s made me want to now go out and read Jones’s other work.
The Verdict:
Stephen Graham Jones’s award-winning horror novel combines vampire tropes with America’s blood-stained indigenous history to create an original and literary Western revenge tale. Although it took me a while to get into the mannered style of Arthur’s journal, once I did it had me gripped and contrasts neatly with Etsy’s modern narration as she slowly realises that she is also being stalked and Jones breathes new life into old horror elements.
Etsy Beaucarne is an academic, who needs to get published. So when a journal, written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor and her grandfather, is discovered within a wall during renovations, she sees her chance. She can uncover the lost secrets of her family, and get tenure.
As she researches, she comes to learn of her grandfather’s life, and the life of a Blackfeet called Good Stab, who came to Arthur to share the story of his extraordinary life. She discovers the journals detail a slow massacre, a chain of events charting the history of Montana state as it formed. A cycle of violence that leads all the way back to 217 Blackfeet murdered in the snow.
A blood-soaked and unflinching saga of the violence of colonial America, a revenge story like no other, and the chilling reinvention of vampire lore from the master of horror.
It’s 16 July 2012.
Etsy Beaucarne is a lecturer in the University of Wyoming’s Communication and Journalism department. Desperate to get tenure, she discontinued her latest application in January after being told that her publications were not up to standard. She knows that this means she needs to get a book published and the perfect opportunity comes when she’s contacted by Lydia Ackerman, the librarian of the University of Montana State’s Special Collection who has recently come into possession of a journal belonging to Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne dated from 1912, which was found hidden in the wall of a church.
As Arthur’s closest living relative (not including her father, who lives in a care facility with dementia), the journal technically belongs to Etsy and Lydia needs Etsy’s agreement to keep it in the Special Collection. Having read the first few pages of the journal, however, Etsy recognises that her great-great-great-grandfather had a way with words and an eye for observation of life in a Montana mining town. The more she reads, the more she realises that there may be enough there to get an academic paper from it, maybe even a book deal, and that certainty grows when Arthur recounts the arrival in his church of a Blackfeet Indian called Good Stab who wants Arthur to take his confession.
Good Stab’s story begins with the discovery by him and two hunting bodies of a strange, figure, being transported by a group of now-dead soldiers in a cage, which manages to escape and attack Good Stab. Over a series of visits he explains to Arthur the transformation that he underwent after the attack and how he came to terms with the same. However both Arthur and Etsy begin to realise that Good Stab’s story really began with the massacre of a Blackfeet tribe by American soldiers, which kick-started a violent search for revenge that’s now tied with a series of disappearances in Arthur’s mining town but which also, inexplicably, seems to be stalking Etsy in 2012 …
Stephen Graham Jones’s award-winning horror novel combines vampire tropes with America’s blood-stained indigenous history to create an original and literary Western revenge tale. Although it took me a while to get into the mannered style of Arthur’s journal, once I did it had me gripped and contrasts neatly with Etsy’s modern narration as she slowly realises that she is also being stalked and Jones breathes new life into old horror elements.
I read this in my capacity as a member of the judging panel for the Best Horror Novel category in the 2026 British Fantasy Society Awards and although Jones is an author who I have been meaning to read for ages following the success of his novel MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW, this is the first book of his that I had read so I came in with no preconceptions.
I very much enjoyed Etsy’s conversational, first person narration and it forms a neat contrast with the more formal, stilted narration from Arthur’s journal. That stilted formality made it difficult for me to get into Arthur’s story at first but it did grow on me as it goes on partly because Jones splits it between Arthur’s account of his life in Miles City and Good Stab’s confession to him, which creates depth and tension, especially as Arthur becomes aware of the disappearances and murders that are slowly affecting the city’s townsfolk.
I thoroughly enjoyed Jones’s take on vampire tropes and the sense of a traditional European horror device being literally and symbolically transplanted to the New World and Good Stab literally and figuratively having to battle the same. The way Good Stab is named and renamed throughout his own account as he comes to terms with what happens to him and to his tribe is very effective as is the fact that even as he recounts Good Stab’s confession, Arthur slowly realises that something else going on. I was less sold on a key revelation towards the end, in part because it relies on a reveal that doesn’t start to come together until the final third of the book and which, for me, needed a tad more foreshadowing than we get. Equally, much as I enjoyed Etsy’s narration and the slowly developing tension as she realises that she herself is also being hunted is well done but the big reveal at the end was a little rushed for me and as such, didn’t land as powerfully as it should have done.
Gripes aside, I think this is a novel that deserves its plaudits. Jones takes all the tropes of the vampire novel and the Western revenge novel and combines them into something original and fascinating by wrapping in the terrible treatment of America’s Indigenous people and the impact on their life and culture. The horror comes from both the violence and the genocide but also the grief that it all creates. It’s a story that’s very much based on human weakness and fear but takes it to its extreme conclusion and it’s made me want to now go out and read Jones’s other work.
The Verdict:
Stephen Graham Jones’s award-winning horror novel combines vampire tropes with America’s blood-stained indigenous history to create an original and literary Western revenge tale. Although it took me a while to get into the mannered style of Arthur’s journal, once I did it had me gripped and contrasts neatly with Etsy’s modern narration as she slowly realises that she is also being stalked and Jones breathes new life into old horror elements.
