How author Stephen Graham Jones' scary stories help us stay alive

Author Stephen Graham Jones has summoned fear in the form of everything from an alien caterpillar to zombie wrestlers. He's used a few, let's say, more traditional scares in between, too, like werewolves and supernatural killing machines.

But his latest hit, "The Buffalo Hunter Hunter," took his work and the horror genre at large to new heights. The novel about a Blackfeet man named Good Stab doesn't stop at striking fear into the reader's heart, nor does it stop at intertwining a vampire story with the very real horrors of settler colonialism. That would've been good enough.

No, Jones went the extra bloody mile, as he so often does, and wrote a novel that begs the question: What can we do with our fear? How do we turn it in our favor?

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I put that question to Jones when I interviewed him for "Meet Me Here" recently, and like any good author, he answered with a story:

"I was in a dentist office, man, this'd probably been 15 years ago... and I was reading a random magazine waiting for my turn. And the magazine, it was a scientific magazine, and it was talking about delivering fresh fish, like from farms to wherever they get turned into food. They kept putting these fish in these big tanker trucks with water, and by the time they arrived at the destination hours and hours later, a too high percentage of these fish would be dead.

They just couldn't stay alive. And they tried everything, you know, different types of water, pH, just everything they could think of. Nothing worked until they dropped a predator fish in there, in the tank. Then, when that tanker truck arrived at the facility, a whole lot more of the fish were alive. And the reason they were alive was this predator fish was swimming among them and keeping them alert, keeping them active, so they didn't die.

I think that's how fear can work for us, too. If we encounter or engage scary stories, they stress us in a good way. They make us more vigilant, more aware of our surroundings, and we stay alive."

Jones' previous works are full of hot tips for if you ever find yourself in a 1980s slasher kind of situation.

Need some final girl energy to outlast supernatural horrors? Try his "Indian Lake" trilogy. Know someone who's (unwillingly) on a murderous rampage and wants to stop? Consult "I Was a Teenage Slasher." Doomed to be caught by the vengeful spirit of that elk you killed but want to at least understand why she's after you? It's got to be "The Only Good Indians."

But "The Buffalo Hunter Hunter" is different.

Lines like this set it apart:

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Jones' character Good Stab is made into a vampire when he encounters a group of colonialist soldiers transporting the Cat Man, the European creature who attacks Good Stab and passes on his curse. And yes, it is a curse. Jones' vampires are not romantic and they don't hang out with high school kids, nor do they sparkle.

Good Stab, like the Cat Man, is a monster. He changes depending on who or what he feeds on, which means to stay Blackfeet, he must feed on his own people.

"For the past probably about 25 years, we've come to kind of understand vampirism as a superpower," Jones told me. "Like, 'Oh, I get bit by by a radioactive spider. Now, I can do things.' That's great for capes-and-tights stories, but for a monster story, like a vampire story, it's important that vampirism be what you called it: a curse."

Still, Good Stab wants to be "the protector, the avenger" of his people, the Blackfeet, their land, their culture. He's afraid of what will happen to them. So, he harnesses that fear and his curse, and he gets revenge. It's bloody and violent and goes on for years, but it's righteous. As the reader, you cannot help but support Good Stab's quest, even as it hardens him.

"Revenge feels really good in the moment," Jones said. "It feels like justice, but it generally hurts you as much as it hurts whoever you're trying to seek that justice against. And I think that's what Good Stab finally comes to learn is that this long vengeance arc he's on, if he doesn't find a way to stop it or let it go, it's gonna devour him."

Jones and I talked about all the fear in the world today, how some people might want to get revenge like Good Stab. But unlike Good Stab, most folks have to be content with turning their fear into a tool sans bloodsucking.

"That's a good point," Jones said with a laugh at that. "Good Stab, in a sense, is reminding us that America's footprints to get where they are are not clean. They're bloody. And I think if we kind of repress the truth of history, then it's gonna rise up all the same, probably worse."

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Survival, then, is what it all comes down to, whatever that might look like in literature or the real world.

"Sometimes it's literal, bodily, physical survival," he said. "Sometimes it's survival or persistence of the spirit or of identity or of the cosmos. There's all different levels of it. But I do think it's usually about survival."

Jones' books and short stories offer all sorts of survival scenarios, and we talked about a few more (like just surviving the daily need to feed and clothe oneself) on KUOW's "Meet Me Here." You can listen by hitting play above or by subscribing to the show wherever you get your podcasts.