This book shares several themes with Ryan Coogler's terrific movie Sinners, which you should see right now if you haven't already (it's the best movie I've seen this year). Coogler sets his tale in 1932 Mississippi, where the vampires, for all their blood and gore, are only incidental to the true horror of Jim Crow and white supremacy. Jones's book has a three-layered structure, with a frame story set in 2012 told by Etsy Beaucarne, a professor trying to achieve tenure who is given an unexpected gift: a fragile, decaying journal found hidden in the wall of an old church, written a century earlier by her great-great-great grandfather, Arthur Beaucarne. Arthur was a pastor in Miles City, Montana, and a century ago he began writing down the purported "confession" of a Pikuni (Blackfeet) Indian, Good Stab. Good Stab visited the pastor every Sunday, and over the weeks spun a fantastical tale of decades past, during the last days of colonization, when the bison were being exterminated and the Natives exploited and hunted to near extinction. Good Stab himself encountered a creature he called the Cat Man, who is obviously a vampire (although that word is not used until the very last page of the book), and was accidentally turned. Good Stab's story is basically the story of the second American sin (after slavery): the Native genocide, and specifically a real historical incident, the Marias Massacre, which the author skillfully weaves into the narrative.
This is described in graphic terms:
I opened my mouth in what I would call pain, but it was deeper. It was all my sin trying to find a way out. Yes, I watched women opened from crotch to throat with knives sharp enough to cut through the heart of the world. Yes, axes were used on the few men in camp, once they were taken prisoner. Yes, the infants' heads were collapsed in with the butts of rifles, one blond soldier instructing the rest how less effort was needed if you came down on top of the head, where it was softer, so you just had to snap down and back, fast, like plunking a misbehaving dog away from your horse.
Yes, I remember the pungent smell of the piles of their bodies and lodges and winter stores, burning.
Arthur Beaucarne, as we find out, was not only at that massacre, he was more or less the instigator of it, with his goading the soldiers about "savages." The Marias Massacre has been the singular obsession of Good Stab's life: he hunts Beaucarne down and his weekly "confessions" are a sort of reverse psychology, weaving his way into the pastor's head to get him to bring forth his own confession. To do this, Good Stab racks up his own body count, killing many of the people of Miles City and dragging their bodies to the pastor's church in the climactic confrontation scene where he finally breaks Beaucarne down.
There is a lot of territory covered before then, however, mainly in Good Stab's struggle to adjust to what he now is. The author does not depict him as some sort of "noble undead." Jones' version of vampirism has some unique twists: Good Stab can walk the earth in daylight even though his eyes are acutely sun-sensitive, for example, and in an extremely black-humored version of "you are what you eat," Good Stab (and the Cat Man, and ultimately Beaucarne) take on the characteristics of those whose blood they consume most often. Good Stab's hair and eyes change color, and he starts growing a beard, for example, if he persists in drinking the blood of "napikwans" (white people). He uses this to dispatch his enemies: he captures the Cat Man and feeds him fish blood until he transforms into a giant sturgeon and swims away. In the century-later climax to the story, Arthur Beaucarne, turned and kept alive for a hundred years by drinking prairie dog blood, until he becomes a seven-foot-long human/prairie dog mutant, is dispatched by his own descendant, Etsy Beaucarne. In this way the story comes full circle, as the great-great-great granddaughter who has inherited the sins of her ancestor closes the loop.
It's fascinating how in this book, as in Sinners, the author uses the well-worn vampire trope to comment on issues far beyond undead monsters. This story is not for the faint of heart, as there is a lot of blood and gore, and not necessarily of the vampiric variety. This is the horror of the European colonization of the American West, and the grotesqueness of "Manifest Destiny," told from the viewpoint of the people who suffered and died because of it. It's not an easy read, but it's an important one.
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