This book has been on many, many lists this year and so I thought I would give it a try. I'm not sure what I thought it would be but it certainly wasn't a horror/vampire novel taking place in the early 1900's.
In the year 2012, the diary of Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran minister is found stuffed into the wall of a building that is being demolished. It chronicles a series of massacres, a transformation, battles and violence between the white settlers and the Blackfeet nation, whose culture is also very much a character in this book. Arthur becomes know as "Three Men" and he is the confessor to Good Stab who discloses many, many things.
If anything this is historical horror. The writing was perfectly fine and the characters very interesting. I found that I could easily picture things everything as they were occurring and in the area that it was happening in. However, I just simply couldn't get behind this novel. It wasn't very interesting to me overall, although the parts about the Blackfeet were very interesting. I enjoyed learning about them very much. The novel goes back and forth between Three Men, who is writing in his diary, and Good Stab who is narrating his confession, which was very effective - the premise is that Arthur is writing down the confession verbatim in his diary - but either one could have carried the story on their own. While I did not particularly rave about this book, I completely respect Jones' historical research into this. He obviously worked very hard to gather a lot of details that he could put into his book and that is highly admirable and appreciated by me as a history major.
While I did not particularly care for this novel, I'm glad that I gave it a shot!
