The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

by Stephen Graham Jones

Once you start taking remarks personally, you find yourself stripped of the objectivity you need to perceive higher truths, and diagnose accordingly.

We never called this place ours like that, though. But that didn’t mean it was yours.

The bolt-cutters I bought at Murdoch’s will get me through the gate——the site of the massacre is on private land, some ranch, and it requires special permission to visit. Fine. I give myself permission, thanks. It’s what we white folk do.

Why even bother to write a vampire novel, when Christopher Buehlman’s The Lesser Dead is already out in the world? Seriously, that book. It’s one of the Great Feats, right up with there with D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

And big thanks to Ken Burns’s The American Buffalo. I hated watching that, but only because I so, so hate that whole long, senseless attempt at an extinction. It fueled me for this novel, I mean. It fuels me still.

Thanks also to Ozzy, for always being the first song of the playlist I wrote this novel to. You were perfect, man. I’ll never hear “Crazy Train” without dropping back into Good Stab’s story, I don’t think.