So19 Reads: STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES'S The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Stephen Graham Jones’ latest novel, Off the Reservation (a sequel to 2021’s The Only Good Indians) appeared last week from Saga Press. I’m thus embarrassed to admit that I’m only now getting to this 2025 title. Among its many honors, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter won the Nebula award for horror, was selected as one of the New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of the Year, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Gabino Iglesias’s review for NPR is among the pieces that can do the book much better justice than I can, but here’s my brief take on this brilliant example of historical horror and literary voice.

Jones constructs the novel from a frame narrative set in 2012, a found manuscript dated 1912, and the earlier events the manuscript chronicles. The manuscript contains the confession of a Blackfeet warrior named Good Stab, who develops both an extraordinary power to heal after injury, and an insatiable thirst for blood, after being bitten by a feral creature called the "Cat Man." Good Stab quenches his thirst by killing and drinking the blood of the white settlers who are moving through the West in search of the buffalo they kill for their hides. It's a violent solution, but in some sense a just one: in addition to being responsible for the deaths of over thirty million buffalo, whites are the people implicated in the capture, transport, and crimes of Cat Man. Even the story's weirdest supernatural elements are fully convincing, as is its re-imagination of the conflict between America's Indigenous peoples and its colonizers. Though Jones' nesting of voices, viewpoints and narratives echoes the structure of Dracula, arguably the most famous vampire novel, nothing about the novel feels derivative of earlier models. It's a completely original, if also profoundly searing, work.

Buy The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones on Bookshop and Amazon. S&S/Saga, 2025. 

So19 Reads: AARON MAHNKE'S Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire

"What would drive a man to exhume the body of his daughter and remove her heart?" Aaron Mahnke asks. 

What, indeed? 

That question is at the heart of the digging around, both figurative and literal, in the author’s latest thought-provoking book. The daughter in question was Mercy Brown, whose demise at 19 helped fuel the late 19th century’s so-called New England Vampire Panic. The fast-moving form of tuberculosis that killed Mercy and several siblings between 1884 and 1892 was an unstoppable force in an era when the operation of communicable diseases was imperfectly understood and effective cures for them nonexistent. Robert Koch identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in 1882, but knowledge of the science involved didn't spread quickly or fully enough to prevent superstition from flourishing: specifically, the belief that consumptives might feed on the living after their deaths, consigning yet more drained and wasted victims to the graveyard. With a local doctor, the townspeople of Exeter, Rhode Island persuaded Mercy’s grieving father to open her grave to see if she had turned over in the coffin, remained full of blood, or failed to decompose normally, all of which were seen as proof that the deceased had turned vampiric. She hadn't, but her heart and liver were burned nonetheless, creating a potion fed to her tubercular brother Edwin in the hopes of halting his disease. Sadly but not surprisingly, he died anyway.

Mahnke, the creator of the multimedia success Lore, does the gruesome parts of the story full justice. But he does equally good job exploring their context, from age-old rituals to 19th-century custom, scrupulous scientific research to pernicious superstition. The focus on vampire beliefs in America is notable too, as the many explorations of the subject tend to focus on Europe. Ultimately, the book’s greatest strength is that it’s less about vampires than about human beings, about the way fear drives apparently ordinary people to do grotesquely extraordinary things.

Buy Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire by Aaron Mahnke on Bookshop and Amazon. Running Press, August 2026. 

So19 Reads: FIONA SAMPSON'S Becoming George

Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of her death, Sampson's new biography urges us to consider the woman born as Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin—the writer who became known as George Sand—as what Rebecca Chao in the New York Times calls "an inventor of stories and also of the self." 

Sand's extraordinarily large literary output, works within which outsold French literary giants Hugo and Balzac during her lifetime, goes largely unread by non-academic readers today. But what Samson calls "her struggle to become herself" still feels both fascinating and relevant in its courage, its energy, and its endless (re)invention. 

"To become George Sand required will, imagination, chutzpah," Samson writes. "In an era when both revolutionary and traditional forces were pulling at the social fabric within which she lived, she managed to emerge as one of the boldest precursors of that perhaps final hope modernity holds out: that we might choose what we become." 

As she suggests, Sand's journey speaks both to the project of refining our own identities in a world that is constantly changing, and to the energy, persistence and resilience required to invent and reinvent ourselves.

Buy Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson on Bookshop and Amazon. Norton, June 2026.

So19 Reads: REBECCA MEAD'S My Life in Middlemarch

Why do we fall profoundly, passionately, perhaps permanently in love with one book and not another? How does our immersion in that single story help us understand life in general and our own life in particular? Rebecca Mead offers a luminous exploration of such questions in this skillful blend of memoir, literary analysis and biography. 

Mead is 17 when she encounters George Eliot's Middlemarch, and it's love at first read. "This book, which had been published serially in eight volumes almost a hundred years before I was born, wasn't dull or dusty, but arresting in the acuteness of its psychological penetration and the snap of its sentences...I couldn't believe how good it was. And I couldn't believe how relevant and urgent it felt." Middlemarch continues to speak to Mead over the years, revealing new aspects of itself—and herself—as she reads and rereads it. 

In her forties, now a successful journalist, she finds herself uncomfortably aware of the "resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade." Her self-cure for melancholy is to return to Middlemarch once more, more fully, immersing herself in the stories of Eliot, the novel, and her own life. Though My Life in Middlemarch might inspire you to reconsider the novel and its author if, like me, you have struggled to enter Eliot's fictional worlds, Mead's book is not merely a paean to that author. Rather, it's a love letter to reading itself, to the power of books and stories and our own curious, shape-shifting selves. As Mead writes, “There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree. This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance." 

Buy My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead on Bookshop and Amazon. Crown, 2014.

So19 Reads: FIVE RECENT MYSTERIES

Catching up on five recent mysteries with nineteenth-century settings and stories...

The Whitechapel Mystery by Tessa Harris. It's lovely to see this new edition of Harris's first Constance Piper mystery. In this initial outing, Constance, a smart and warm-hearted flower girl, is worried by the growing list of women being murdered in London's grimy and impoverished East End. She's also working to find Emily Tindall, her former teacher and mentor, who seems to have disappeared. The emergence of a helpful guide who speaks through Constance's intuition gives the grittier aspects of the plot an interesting spectral dimension and creates intriguing possibilities that Harris mines deftly in later installments. Buy The Whitechapel Mystery by Tessa Harris on Bookshop or Amazon. DP Books, August 2026.

Miss Morton Takes the Waters by Catherine Lloyd. Bath turns out to be an unhealthy destination in Lloyd’s smart and lively fifth Miss Morton mystery. Caroline Morton accompanies her employer, the inimitable Mrs. Frogerton, to the ancient city to restore the older woman’s health and spirits. There, the pair is introduced to a circle of women who meet to chat and play cards. After they learn that the ladies are being plagued by poison pen letters, Lady Greatmere, arguably the group's least pleasant member, is found dead in her locked drawing room with an incomplete poison pen letter beside her. Did a poison pen target the victim, or did one of Lady Greatmere's other enemies kill her? Just as puzzling, how did the culprit get in? The amateur murder investigation Morton and Frogerton conduct offers both sleuths plenty of scope to display their particular gifts as well as their complementary personalities. Lloyd's evocation of 1838 Bath and its denizens, both permanent and temporary, is vivid throughout, and the locked-room aspect of the plotting adds an enjoyable dextra dimension to the puzzle. But I must confess: my favorite part of this installment, like every book in this series, is the funny and feisty Mrs. Frogerton.  Buy Miss Morton Takes the Waters by Catherine Lloyd on Bookshop or Amazon. Kensington, August 2026.

So19 Reads: HANNAH WEBSTER FOSTER'S The Coquette

What a gift to have this meticulous edition of a fascinating but (to most of us, at least) long forgotten book. 

Hannah Webster Foster (1758 or 1759 - 1840) published The Coquette anonymously in 1797. Her epistolary novel became a bestseller, though it wasn’t attributed to Foster until almost twenty years after her death. Foster based her story on the real-life case of Elizabeth Whitman, an accomplished and attractive woman who was twice engaged but never married. After she became pregnant by a lover (his identity is still unknown), she traveled to a roadside tavern under the name “Mrs. Walker” and died after giving birth to a stillborn child. While her personal story was generally viewed as a tale of well- (or ill-?) deserved moral consequences rather than a relatable human tragedy, Foster’s revision of events takes a more nuanced view. 

In this meticulously produced edition, the full text of the novel is accompanied by its 1855 Preface and an 1875 response, which provide invaluable context. The book showcases a complex narrative, its literary afterlife, and the way stories are told and retold, interpreted and reinterpreted. 

Hannah Foster Webster was also the author of a 1798 novel called The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils, which explores education for women and its application in their adult lives. Like The Coquette, its author was credited simply as "A Lady of Massachusetts." The author's daughters, Harriet Vaughan Cheney and Eliza Lanesford Cushing, both became popular 19th-century authors.

The publisher of this edition of The Coquette, P-Wave Press, also publishes excellent editions of historic texts by Charlotte Lenox, Thomas Holcroft, and Thomas Love Peacock among others.

The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster is internationally on the P-Wave Press website and also, in America, on Amazon. P-Wave Press Classics, April 2026.

So19 Reads: ADITI BHIDE'S Secrets of the Monsoon Sky

In Bhide's vividly evoked debut novel, a young woman seeks family connection amid the cultural collisions and constraints of World War I-era India. 

Eartha Rae is raised in a British orphanage, becomes a hospital nurse during the first World War, and accepts a private nursing job in Winchcombe, England after the mental distress (we'd call it PTSD) of military nursing grows too great. When she receives a letter from a woman claiming to be her aunt, she's both wary and intrigued. It's possible that the letter is a scam—but if the writer is actually her aunt, she might be able to provide the family information and connection Eartha has has always longed for. 

Their meeting leaves Eartha convinced that Mary S. Martin is just who she claims, and, though she doesn't yet learn how she ended up in a British orphanage, she relishes even the snippets of information her aunt shares in their initial conversation. After her employer dies, Eartha accepts Martin's invitation to join her in Chandangudi, India, where her husband Angus works as a civilian administrator in the Indian Army. By the time she arrives in Bombay weeks later, Mrs. Martin is dead of fever, leaving no one but Eartha's devastated uncle and the community's Englishwomen to help her adjust to the life of the British in India.