Vampiric Repair: A Sort of Review

01 Jun, 2025

There’s real genius in using vampires to illuminate still-living histories of injustice that, if we’re honest, will probably never be made right. Ghosts, which at most might walk through or throw things at you, are, according to much lore, susceptible to exorcism or appeasement. Broadcast to the world the identity of their real killers, provide their remains with a proper burial, send a message of comfort to a distraught survivor: problem solved. But vampires, in addition to presenting a distinct and life-threatening danger, are also, if you remove the sunlight and stake-through-the-heart solutions, nearly impossible to do away with. They’re harder to make disappear, to forget about; they’re not the sort who just wants to have you acknowledge and accept their quiet messages, letting both of you then go your separate ways feeling relieved that the air’s been cleared.

Renée L. Bergland lays out the peculiar love non-Native inhabitants of the US have long had for the country’s Indigenous ghosts.¹ Settlers new to the nascent nation convinced themselves not only that their genocidal efforts were necessary steps in civilizational progress, but that those efforts had been so successful that North America’s first inhabitants were so nearly completely wiped out that those Natives could, even in the nineteenth century, be conveniently assumed to be no more than long-gone, now noble, ghosts. Then as now, the peoples original to the continent provided a nation with its own (as opposed to European) grounding legends and symbols, ones able to serve as reminders of well, yes, they’d been treated terribly, but also that the bad old days were over now. Even had we wanted to do anything differently, or even give back what had been taken from them, those first people no longer exist; there’d be no one to restore anything to. No problem remains, then, to disturb us—but in recognizing some lamentable events had taken place, we can absolve ourselves of any lingering guilt. By feeling sorry about a past history and celebrating the heroes that went down, we’ve done our job, and can keep the past in the past—and now back to progress. When feelings of guilt or discomfort pop up from time to time, we can take up a good tale of marauders or developers being punished for invading an Indian burial ground.

Vampires, though: they’re not so easily dispensed of, and although Anne Rice made a good attempt at it (and Jim Jarmusch a much better, and absolutely beautiful one), they’re much harder to romanticize.² Enter Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, though, and we’ve got a creepy tale that turns out to be not so much a matter of gore and supernatural seduction and the safe-distance thrill-chills we look for in horror, but an otherworldly account of how individuals get caught up in, un/wittingly unleash, and are unable to escape from, the very human-produced horror of murder and war, and the prejudices to which its perpetrators are often blind.³ This particular history deals with the context and legacy of one of among so many similar episodes: the 1870 US military massacre in Montana of around 200 Piikani Indians.

Novels in general are good at making still-living histories as recognizably disturbing as they are. And especially given the US’s tendency to excuse itself for many an inexcusable action, I’ll wager that for the average reader, works of fiction, with characters we care about, or at least are interested in, can be more effective in showing up those histories for what they are, and in convincing said reader that they matter, than can a straightforward accounting of facts and records, or historians’ attempts to convince audiences of a particular interpretation. (This situation might admittedly be due to the assumption that it’s “just a story,” and so easier to dismiss as irrelevant to everyday life.) Wrap an unfinished history within a thrilling genre aimed at entertainment, and you’ve captured at least some audiences who would otherwise condemn as woke something like Bergland’s book or Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide without ever even opening the cover.⁴ In being entertained from a distance, drawn into made-up stories and ostensibly not asked to take a moral position on any of it, the distance might be safe enough to at least make a reader start wondering about questions of something as basic as right and wrong.

But what Jones seems to understand in particular about what I guess I’d call historical horror fiction is that once you start preaching, you’ll lose your readers and run your story to the ground. And simultaneously, that once you let anyone off the hook, likable or forgivable or not, you’re copping out.⁵ It’s hard to back up my arguments with examples without giving the book away. But let’s just say that this intergenerational story-within-a-story avoided both unrestrained bloodbath and schlocky kumbaya resolution, not letting either side completely justify its actions by literally demonizing its enemies—and also not granting the reader the innocence or self-satisfaction of distance, either. If there’s such a thing as a generous horror story, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is it, suggesting that it might be possible to recognize evil, acknowledge unintended human frailty and fear, demand restitution, and also leave maybe a sliver of possibility that wholesale cancellation of individuals, at least, won’t serve anyone. Collective attempts to face up to collective wrongs are tall orders, even if we can’t stop working at those efforts. But one thing this novel may be hinting at is that individual absolution may be imaginable, even if not without nearly unbearable and definitely long-lasting torments.

Vampires have eternity to work all this out, even if the rest of the world insists on quick dismissals, and will eventually be granted the mercy of good old-fashioned physical death. For the undead, though, forced to survive outside of time on the future-focused living, the question becomes whether, once they do reach some sort of resolution, they can finally achieve the peace of being able to give up their own ghost like everyone else. To then say that a story needs a vampire to make plain its insolubility, the way its inheritors have grown deaf or even dead to its demands, is to signal that we’ve got a long-standing, more than troubling impasse on our hands, and one that won’t be rectified for an equally long time—maybe, even and shamefully, an eternity.

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