Book of the Day

From the review

The book arrives as paperwork before it arrives as horror. A found journal, dated 1912, gets handed to a university researcher named Etsy, who annotates it as she reads. Footnotes interrupt the narrative just often enough to remind you someone is editing this, deciding what to trust and what to flag. It's a slow way into a vampire novel, and it turns out to be the right one. By the time the actual account starts, first the pastor's own words, then a captive audience of one Blackfeet man named Good Stab, the reader has already learned to read everything twice. Good Stab talks for pages at a stretch, working through decades of his life for an audience of one increasingly rattled pastor. He was turned during the years when U.S. cavalry were hunting the Blackfeet as thoroughly as they hunted the buffalo, and his account keeps circling back to a single winter morning: soldiers, a frozen river, over two hundred dead. Jones doesn't stage that scene as a twist. He tells you early it's coming, then makes you sit through every mile that leads there, so that when the killing finally arrives, it lands like something already grieved rather than something sprung on you.