The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

In 2012 a worker renovating a Montana parsonage finds a journal hidden in its wall. It was written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a minister who spent several weeks taking the confession of a Blackfeet man calling himself Good Stab, and it is Good Stab's voice, transcribed, that carries most of the novel.

Good Stab is a vampire. He explains how he became one, at length and without hurry, and what he has done with the condition since, which is hunt the white hunters who slaughtered the buffalo herds and, behind them, the men who took part in a massacre on the Marias River in 1870 that left around two hundred Blackfeet dead in the snow, most of them women, children and the sick.

Jones works the vampire rules hard and makes them specific: what Good Stab becomes depends on what he last fed on, and feeding on white men means carrying them inside him, which is its own punishment.

The structure is three deep, a modern academic reading a minister transcribing a confession, and each layer is unreliable in a different direction.

Beaucarne is the quiet horror. He is a decent man by his own account, writing up a parishioner's confession, and the reader works out what he is well before he does.

Around four hundred and fifty pages, patient through the middle and appalling at the end, with the historical violence rendered plainly and without any of the softening a western would apply. Expect graphic feeding, animal death and a long account of the massacre itself.

Best for readers who want horror that is doing history rather than decorating it, and who can take a revenge story in which the revenge does not help anybody.