
He's ‘the Worst Dream America Ever Had,' and He's Out for Revenge
Stephen Graham Jones's new novel would give Gen. Philip Sheridan fits. The Civil War officer is often cited as the source of one of the most infamous sayings in American history, 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian,' and there are dozens if not hundreds of dead Indians in 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.' There's also a very long-living or, more accurately, undead one who opines: 'What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had.' Take that, General!
Good Stab is an Indigenous man from the Blackfeet tribe living in Montana around the time of the 1870 Marias Massacre, when U.S. Army troops killed nearly 200 unarmed women, children and elderly members of the Blackfeet Nation, a tragedy that figures in a multitude of ways throughout this gruesome joyride of a novel.
One day, Good Stab is caught in a violent encounter with a wagon train of white settlers holding a supernatural being in a cage. The strange, humanish creature is bloodthirsty, death-defying, antagonistic, charismatic and chatty. He's called the Cat Man, and he's a centuries-old vampire. During an ensuing skirmish with the white settlers, the Cat Man is freed and his blood gets mixed into a wounded Good Stab, who then becomes a bloodsucker as well.
Now released, the Cat Man preys on Good Stab's tribe, which enrages Good Stab, leading to decades of conflict between the two. All the while, each is on a near-perpetual quest for vengeance against white settlers and for survival in 19th-century Montana.
None of this will be any surprise to readers of Jones's past fiction, which has confidently mashed up various horror genres with pointed explorations of Native American experience. But two features stand out with his latest: first, the particular terms of vampiric living.
Rather than cloaked, castled mystery and wealthy Eurotrash vibes (familiar features of the vampire story, from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' in 1897 through to Robert Eggers's remake of 'Nosferatu' in 2024), the monsters in 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter' are High Plains eternal drifters who have to drain their victims completely to remain vital. Moreover, in a mordant deep joke on the saying that you are what you eat, Cat Man and Good Stab inevitably take on the attributes of their victims, whether humans or animals.
Dante would be pleased with the situation Jones has created, though social justice-oriented readers looking for an easy-to-cheer-for BIPOC vigilante be warned: Good Stab can only defend his people and carry out vengeance on behalf of the Blackfeet by, as the novel's title suggests, killing and feeding on lots and lots of Native Americans himself.
And his Blackfeet victims aren't just fellow warriors in the midst of battles, either. In one case, Good Stab gorges on a child after crawling into the lodge of a sleeping family. First he quietly bites into her throat. 'I didn't think she could scream anymore, but I didn't want her mother to have to see this,' he observes. But his remorse means little compared with his sudden insight: The younger the person he blood-sucks dry, the stronger he becomes. Cat Man already knows this, which leads to a wrenching climactic encounter with Good Stab that recalls the awful dilemma at the center of Ursula K. Le Guin's story 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.'
The consequences of this showdown stay with Good Stab forevermore. He unpacks his unquiet heart decades later, and his doing so plays out through the second distinctive feature of Jones's novel: its story-within-story-within-story structure.
The novel opens with a discovery — in 2012, a book hidden in the wall of an old parsonage is found by an unnamed construction worker. It turns out to be a journal, written in 1912 and belonging to Arthur Beaucarne, the pastor of the local Lutheran congregation. Inside it contains the story of his strange encounters with Good Stab, who, after years of carnage, has seemingly come to him to confess.
In the novel's 1912 sections, Jones adeptly plays into the expectations we have of horror tales. Good Stab appears and disappears in the church at will; people in town are being killed inexplicably; the sheriff doesn't believe Beaucarne when he tries to tell him his suspicions about Good Stab; and Beaucarne himself has a secret past, which makes his vow to listen to Good Stab's confession with 'a good heart' increasingly suspect. Jones creates and builds a strong sense of suspense and mystery in the 1912 sections, whereas the Good Stab passages are comparatively loose and repetitively graphic, to the point of tedium.
This all comes to us through yet another frame narrative — at the beginning of the novel, Etsy Beaucarne, a flailing academic and descendant of Arthur, acquires the journal. Reading it, she's curious about what she learns of her ancestor and his undead companion. As the novel unfolds, Jones moves back and forth between Beaucarne's haunting in 1912 and Good Stab's hunting in the years before, reserving Etsy's discovery of her family connection to a strange and supernatural past for the opening and closing segments of the book.
What is Jones doing here, with this trifold narrative structure? He has created a novel that invites us to reflect on how the stories we tell about ourselves can be at once confessions and concealments. At the same time, he's using this framework to set up some scary, big reveals. Do the vampire math, people: The story Etsy's reading from a hundred years ago isn't finished yet.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘Dexter's Laboratory' & ‘The Powerpuff Girls' Creators On How They Broke The System At Cartoon Network
If he was starting out today, Dexter's Laboratory creator Genndy Tartakovsky would 'make cartoon after cartoon until something hits.' That was Tartakovsky's pearl of wisdom delivered to a packed Annecy audience as he celebrated 25 years of Cartoon Network Studios with a sextet of creators of some of the biggest American cartoons of all time, including The Powerpuff Girls, Adventure Time and Steven Universe. More from Deadline From Brink Of Bankruptcy, TeamTO Unveils Six New Shows & Adult Animation Push At Annecy Neil Court Joins Coolabi As Chairman Amid 'Warrior Cats' Growth Push And M&A Opportunities "Je Suis Milhouse": Matt Groening Gets Emotional At Annecy As He Reveals The Motivation Behind The 800-Episode Longevity Of 'The Simpsons' Tartakovsky, who is also in Annecy promoting Netflix's Fixed, figures it's easier than ever to get your big break because young cartoonists can flood YouTube with ideas. 'It's partly independent now because you can make it and put it on your own kind of cable channel,' he added. 'That's what I'd do [if I were starting now]. I'd work a day job and then at night I'd make cartoon after cartoon until something hits. It was more difficult when we were coming up.' Tartakovsky is enthused by the new landscape and said he 'feels like when I was younger, I feel like that energy makes me still want to do new things.' He sat next to his old friend and The Powerpuff Girls creator Craig McCracken, who concurred, saying that for his spin-off of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, which he is making with Warner-owned Hanna Barbera Studios Europe, 'the energy is so Cartoon Network' on set. Adam Muto, showrunner of Adventure Time, was slightly more muted on the current state of things. 'We need to make sure people with idiosyncrasies get to have their own voices,' he said. 'But [commissioners] have to greenlight stuff. They have gotta greenlight.' 'We were breaking the system' Tartakovsky and McCracken walked the Annecy audience through how they broke the system at Cartoon Network Studios a quarter century ago when they were first starting out, with Tartakovsky describing the older generation of cartoonists back then as being 'beaten down' when he landed his Dexter's Laboratory greenlight as a young man. McCracken, who worked with Tartakosvky on Dexter's Laboratory, added: 'We were breaking the system and they didn't like that. They were survivalists and we had been given an opportunity they had been working their whole lives for. I felt a bit bad for them but we were given this golden opportunity, this one seven-minute show. And to be fair some of the old guard loved what we were doing.' Tartakosvky set the scene for the early days of Dexter's Lab, which went on to achieve the rare feat of being a primetime Emmy-nominated cartoon. 'Half the crew were high,' he joked. 'I felt like I was saying, 'Guys come on this is our one shot,' and then they wouldn't start working till 2 p.m.' He said he was 'so worried about getting fired' that he 'didn't have a minute to focus on anything apart from what I was doing.' Soon after, McCracken's Powerpuff Girls landed a greenlight, making him into a star of the animation world, but this wasn't plain sailing either. McCracken spoke of experiencing the worst focus group of his life with a group of 11-year-old boys, one of whom even called for the 'creator to be fired.' At the time, Cartoon Network executive Mike Lazzo convinced McCracken that it was better to have people hate the show than be indifferent, and he was told to push ahead. 'I had to get out of my own head and tell myself to stop being so arty,' said McCracken. 'We felt we could make cartoons at the time so we said let's make this the best thing it can be.' The pair were joined on stage by four younger cartoon creators including Muto, Regular Show's JG Quintel, Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar and Adventure Time's Pendleton Ward. This quartet, who were termed the 'second generation' of Cartoon Network voices, had an intriguing discussion around fear of failure. 'The first season we thought we'd get canned every moment,' said Muto. 'It was during a transitional moment [for Cartoon Network] and our shows had to be hits.' Quintel said creatives live in fear at the start of their journeys that 'if these are bad, then we're getting in trouble.' For Sugar, who is the first non-binary person to independently create a series for the network, it was 'less about competition and more about protection' at the start of her journey. 'I learned when showrunning that when there is something specific on a board, you have to think how to protect it,' she explained. Sugar was delighted to sit on the same stage as Tartakovsky. She recalled pitching him an early version of Steven Universe. When Tartakosvky said he'd direct an ep, 'I crashed my car into a pole on the way home,' Sugar added. The group were speaking at Annecy on the same day as Matt Groening. Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds A Full Timeline Of Blake Lively & Justin Baldoni's 'It Ends With Us' Feud In Court, Online & In The Media Where To Watch All The 'John Wick' Movies: Streamers That Have All Four Films

Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Sly Stone: influential funk pioneer who embodied the contradictions at the heart of American life
There's immense variety in popular music careers, even beyond the extremes of one-hit wonders and the long-haulers touring stadiums into their dotage. There are those who embody a specific era, burning briefly and brightly, and those whose legacy spans decades. Straddling both of those, and occupying a distinctive space in popular music history, is Sylvester Stewart, better known as Sly Stone, who died at the age of 82 on Monday June 9. A pioneer of funk whose sound spread far beyond the genre, his band Sly and the Family Stone synthesised disparate strands of American popular music into a unique melange, tracking the musical and social shifts as the 1960s wore into the 1970s. Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here. A musical prodigy and multi-instrumentalist from a young age, Stone was born in Texas in 1943 and raised in California, in a religious Pentecostal family. He had put out his first single aged 13 – a locally released gospel song with three of his siblings, who would later join him in Sly and the Family Stone. A record producer and DJ by his early twenties, he imbibed the music of British acts like The Beatles and Rolling Stones, and applied his eclectic tastes and musical versatility to producing local psychedelic and garage rock acts in the emergent San Francisco scene. By the time commercial popular culture had flowered into a more exploratory 'counterculture' in 1967's Summer of Love, the ebb and flow of personnel across local bands had coalesced into a line-up including the Stone siblings – Sly, Freddie, and their sister Vaetta, with their other sister Rose joining in 1968. Pioneering socially, as well as aesthetically, Sly and the Family Stone had diversity at its core – a mixed sex, multi-racial and musically varied band. This was notable for a mainstream act in an America still emerging from the depths of segregation, and riven with strife over the struggle for civil rights. While their first album in 1967 A Whole New Thing enjoyed comparatively little traction, 1968's Dance to the Music presaged a run of hits. Their sonic collision of sounds from across the commercial and social divide – psychedelic rock, soul, gospel and pop – struck a chord with audiences simultaneously looking forward with hope to changing times, and mindful of the injustice that was still prevalent. Singles like Everyday People, Stand, and I Want to Take You Higher, melded a party atmosphere with social statements. They were calls for action, but also for unity: celebratory, but pushing the musical envelope. While the band wore its innovations lightly at first, their reach was long. Bassist Larry Graham was a pioneer of the percussive slap bass that became a staple of funk and fusion. And their overall sound brought a looser, pop feel to the funk groove, in comparison to the almost militaristic tightness of that other funk pioneer, James Brown. Where Brown's leadership of his group was overt, exemplified by his staccato musical directions in the songs, and the call and response structure, Stone's band had more of an ensemble feel. Musical lines and solos were overlaid upon one another, often interweaving – more textured rather than in lock-step. It was a sound that would reach an almost chaotic apogée with George Clinton's Funkadelic later in the 1970s. The party couldn't last. As the optimism of the 1960s gave way to division in the 1970s, Stone's music took a darker turn, even if the funk remained central. The album There's A Riot Going On (1971), and its lead single It's Family Affair contained lyrics depicting social ills more explicitly. The music – mostly recorded by Sly himself – was sparser, the vocals more melancholic. The unity of the band itself was also fracturing, under pressure from Stone's growing cocaine dependency. The album Fresh (1973) featured classics like In Time and If You Want Me To Stay, but they were running out of commercial road by 1974's Small Talk, and broke up soon after. Periodic comebacks were punctuated by a troubled personal life, including, at its nadir, reports of Stone living out of a van in Los Angeles, and arrests for drug possession. By the time he achieved a degree of stability, his star may have faded, but his legacy was secure. Stone embodied the contradictions of American popular music – arguably even America itself: brash and light-hearted on the one hand, with a streak of darkness and self-destructiveness on the other. The handclaps and joyous shouts harked back to his gospel roots, but his embrace of electric instruments aligned soul with rock and pop. He was a funk artist who played at the archetypal hippie festival, Woodstock, and a social commentator whose party sounds were shot through with urgency. He paved the way for the likes of Prince and Outkast, but also informed jazz and fusion. Jazz pioneer Miles Davis acknowledged Stone's influence on his own turn towards electric and funk sounds in the late 1960s and early 1970s on landmark albums like Bitches Brew. Sly Stone's joyful provocations may not have lasted at the commercial centre, but his mark was indelible. His struggles were both personal and social, but his sense of groove, and of a collective voice, demonstrated the value of aligning traditions with new ideas – a musical America that was fractious, but still a family affair. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
‘Pinch' Review: Taut Debut Highlights One Woman's Response to Sexual Harassment — and Complicity
A large family enters a crowded train car. They spread out — busying themselves finding seats, settling in, placing luggage — when the youngest adult woman feels the unwelcome hand of a passing stranger. She whips around, but the man has already disappeared into the crowd, and when she tells a trusted female relative, the result is instinctive disgust, but only briefly. 'That just happens.' More from IndieWire Studio Ghibli at 40: Can an Ethical Animation Studio Still Exist, or Even Survive? 'Eddington' Trailer: Ari Aster's Western of Pandemic Paranoia Hits Theaters After Dividing Cannes This is not exactly a scene from Uttera Singh's 'Pinch,' but similar enough and entirely true. Her debut feature and 2025 Tribeca Festival premiere takes on a small piece of a big topic, delivering not only a gripping and nuanced narrative but an astutely told directing effort. Writer and director Singh plays Maitri, whose life takes a sharp turn when her landlord gropes her on a bus and she retaliates in kind. Soon, the incident involves Maitri's mother, their neighbors, and the small community living in their building, where the man serves as landlord and wields all the power. 'Pinch' is definitionally a film about assault; a woman being groped on a bus or pinched in a crowd is still wrong even if it's not rape, a point that Maitri makes explicitly. It's shocking, distressing, inappropriate, and worth condemning, and her conviction rattles everyone around her. Mother Shobha (Geeta Agrawal) begs her to forget about it — about something that happens to every woman at some point, she says — but the film doesn't fall into the trap of villainizing her. Singh writes Shobha with tangible empathy for the generation before her, for mothers and aunts who normalized sexual misconduct because they felt there was no other choice. She ends up being a critical confidante for Maitri as the film goes on, criticizing and comforting her in equal measure as only a mother can. The ensemble is equally strong, giving grounded performances that strengthen the community dynamic; Sunita Rajwar as a neighbor who comfortably walks over Shobha, Badri Chavan as Maitri's pal Samir (and the more successful vlogger among them), and Sapna Sand as Rani, the imperious wife of Maitri's attacker. Together, they embody societal notions of respect, stubbornness, and principle — the old Indian refrain of 'Log kya kahenge?' — and walking reminders of how treacherous it is to ignore and doubt survivors. Singh and cinematographer Adam Linzey opt for tight, tense tracking shots, placing viewers firmly in Maitri's mind and space as she navigates the ripple effect of her assault and escalating discomfort with hiding the truth. Raashi Kulkarni's score periodically deploys influences from Indian classical music, with an actor on screen to perform the rhythmic syllables. The film derives locational specificity not from city or region, but from the apartment building and local community, adding deliberate claustrophobia to the overall narrative tension. In a statement for the show's press materials, Singh expressed hope that 'Pinch' will start essential conversations between generations and genders, because no group can be tasked with liberating itself in isolation. In her hands, 'Pinch' is the kind of film that leaves the viewer invigorated instead of weary — and ready to follow the rest of Singh's career. 'Pinch' premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best reviews, streaming picks, and offers some new musings, all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst