Grounded Visionary
The Living Companion
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
The room beside the guide — open it during your meeting.
Two cards to open the room. Read them aloud if you like.
This is sold as a vampire story, and there is real body horror in it — feeding, transformation, violence that lands hard. But underneath sits documented history: the Marias Massacre, the deliberate near-extinction of the buffalo, the starvation and erasure of the Blackfeet world. Tonight will ask you to sit with both layers, and with histories close to your own.
You decide how close you get. Any question, any go-around, you can pass — no explanation owed. Sitting at the edge of this is still showing up.
This book tends to correct your expectations somewhere in the first stretch — you come for a creature and find a country.
Go around the room. In one sentence each: what kind of horror did you think you were getting — and what did you actually get? No defending it yet; just the turn, then the next voice.
Four threads run beneath the creature. Name them so the whole room follows the same water.
Good Stab doesn't become what he is in a vacuum — he becomes it in the wreckage of massacre, starvation, and a herd hunted to nothing. Follow whether the supernatural horror and the historical horror are two different things or the same one wearing different clothes. The book seems certain you can't pull them apart.
They were food, culture, spirituality, sovereignty — a whole way of relating to the world. When the herd is destroyed, follow everything else that goes with it. The horror isn't only that a people lost their land; it's that they lost the relationships that made the land mean anything.
Good Stab confesses to Arthur — a white Lutheran pastor — and he isn't asking to be absolved. And the whole account reaches us secondhand: a journal sealed in a wall, read a century later by Etsy. The past never speaks for itself here; it comes filtered, partial, late. That's not a flaw in the telling. It's the argument.
Etsy carries an inheritance she never asked for and can't put down. Follow what the book thinks families pass down — guilt, consequence, or something that doesn't have a clean name yet — and whether inheriting a history is the same as being responsible for it.
Five questions pointed at you, not the page. Sit with one before you answer.
What's one piece of history you were never taught — and who decided you didn't need to know it?
The Marias Massacre didn't make most textbooks. Name a history you had to find on your own, and sit a second with the cost of not knowing it sooner.
If you needed someone to sit with what you carry — not forgive it — who would you choose?
Good Stab didn't pick a friend or an elder. He picked the person who'd feel the weight most. Who's yours, and what does that choice say about what you actually want?
What did your family pass down that no one ever named out loud?
A pattern, a silence, a wound, a way of moving through the world — the kind of thing you only recognized as inherited once you were already living it.
If you could seal one true thing in a wall for a hundred years, what would it say?
Arthur hid the confession where it would outlive him. What would you want a stranger in the next century to find — and why couldn't you just say it now?
When you've witnessed a hard truth, did knowing obligate you to anything?
The book keeps asking whether understanding is enough, or whether it demands you act, preserve, pass it on. Answer for a truth you've actually carried.
A book this dark buries its light. Dig it back up before you close — this is the part the room forgets to say out loud.
Against a century, a wall, and a descendant who almost didn't read it, one true account survived. There's something close to defiance in that — a refusal to let the story be the thing that died.
Jones's prose earns its rereads — not because it's confusing, but because it's exact. Even at its darkest, the craft is a pleasure worth naming out loud.
For all the horror in him, Good Stab spent decades protecting the remnant of the herd — haunting the hunters, keeping watch. Under the violence is an act of care for the very thing being erased.
This history reaches us through a Blackfeet writer telling the story of his own people — not a tragedy narrated from outside, but a reckoning from within. Remembrance here is also a kind of return.
The guilt of it defines the rest of his arc. He stays away from his own afterward; the trail of what survival cost runs through everything that comes next. The room has to name what to do with that.
Tap your vote. You'll get the case your vote owes the room — then defend it in 30 seconds. No neutral positions. No changing your vote once you've heard the others.
Say out loud the question the room should actually be asking about this scene, then take a show of hands on it. The distance between "justified / inexcusable" and wherever you land is the conversation this book wants you to have. Don't resolve it too fast.
The tell: the room locks onto "is Good Stab a hero or a monster?" and stays there all night. It's a real conversation — and a comfortable loop that keeps the book at the level of one character.
"Good Stab is the easy debate. Arthur and Etsy are the hard one — what do the living owe a history they inherited but didn't make? Let's move the trial."
The tell: someone calls the present-day Etsy sections the weak part, the room nods along, and you move on as if it's a flaw to forgive.
"Don't apologize for that layer — interrogate it. What does it mean that the part set in our own time is the one we least want to stay with?"
The tell: a hard historical beat lands, the room goes quiet, and someone pulls it straight back to the creature, the feeding, the plot. The horror becomes a way to skip the history.
"Stay here a second. The creature sits on top of something documented and real. What's underneath the horror that we just hurried past?"
The tell: it becomes clear part of the room doesn't know the Marias Massacre actually happened — they're filing it alongside the vampire as invention.
"Quick ground-truth: the Marias Massacre is real. 1870. More than two hundred Blackfeet, mostly women, children, and elders. The book earns its horror because that part isn't made up."
When violence is this total, justice was never on the table; pretending a novel could deliver it would betray the history. Remembrance — Etsy choosing to sit with it rather than resolve it — is the only honest response left, and the most this story could truthfully offer. The refusal to tie a bow on it is the integrity of the book.
"Sitting with history" can be the posture of someone doing nothing — and the academy, with its long record of profiting from Indigenous suffering, is exactly where that posture is most comfortable. Calling the refusal of justice "honesty" lets everyone off the hook, the reader included. Remembrance can be where responsibility goes to rest.
The question the book leaves open — on purpose — is what remains when the scale of harm is too large to repair: justice, revenge, remembrance, or something we don't yet have a word for. Leave the room with the harder version: is remembrance enough, or is it the thing we tell ourselves so we don't have to do more — and who, in the end, gets to decide what survives?