Boulder’s Stephen Graham Jones, an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author, has reached a new level of popularity and success with the release of his latest book, the vampire horror novel “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.”

The idea for Jones’ latest book, which NPR called his “horror masterpiece,” was born in a vampire class at the University of Colorado Boulder, where Jones is a professor.

“I’d been thinking of vampires for all the semester: their characteristics, their origin stories, how the stories work, what the stock characters are that repeat over and over,” Jones said. “And they were all swirling around in my head. And so I wrote the novel.”

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” is a vampire novel that follows a Lutheran pastor who transcribes a series of confessions from a Blackfeet man who waged war against buffalo hunters to try to preserve the herds. Jones is a Blackfeet Native American author who’s also written “The Only Good Indians,” “My Heart is a Chainsaw” and “I was a Teenage Slasher.”

“The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” has 4.15 out of 5 stars on Goodreads and more than 10,000 reviews since it was released on March 18. An additional 97,000 people have marked the book as “want to read” on the site.

“America’s superpower that it uses over and over again is forgetting or pretending that something didn’t happen,” Jones said. “And this novel being about guilt and punishment and revenge, hopefully dramatizes that in a way that can leave the reader with the realization that just because you forget about it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

The New York Times Book Review featured “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” in its list of current recommendations alongside other big-time titles, including “Sunrise on the Reaping” by “Hunger Games” author Suzanne Collins.

Since it was released in March, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” has held a place on the Boulder Bookstore’s list of bestsellers, which is a list of the top 25 best-selling books at the bookstore. Maintaining a spot on the list means “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” has been selling at a steady and relatively high rate since its release.

Arsen Kashkashian, the head buyer at the Boulder Bookstore, said it has sold about 300 copies of “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” since its release, which is the most the Boulder Bookstore has ever sold of an individual book written by Jones.

“He’s been pretty big for us now for quite a while, (and) he keeps getting bigger and bigger,” Kashkashian said.

This is Jones’ first vampire novel, a topic he had stayed away from previously because it never made sense to him. Vampire stories are told over and over, he said, and a lot of stories add something new to the vampire that gets carried over to other stories.

“It can fly, it can turn to mist, it can turn into wolves, it can turn into bats,” Jones said. “There’s so much stuff, and so what appealed to me about writing the vampire was, can I strip off a lot of that and get to the real creature underneath?”

The Boulder Bookstore also offers signed copies of Jones’ new book. Customers can order a copy, and Jones comes into the bookstore every month or two to sign and personalize copies. Kashkashian said people from across the country are also ordering signed copies from the Boulder Bookstore at an increasing rate, a sign of Jones’ national following expanding.

“We see not just growth in Boulder here, but we see how people around the country are in tune with what he’s doing,” Kashkashian said.

Kashkashian said “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” shows a different side of Jones’ writing and is a great book for his fans. People have really liked it, he said.

“I think he’s got a lot to say…and it’s resonating with a lot of people,” Kashkashian said.

William Kuskin, the chair of the English department at CU Boulder, has known Jones for more than a decade. They were hired at the university within a year of each other.

“Stephen is inspirational. He’s brilliant, he’s modest,” Kuskin said. “He’s a genre writer, but like the best genre writers, has transcended genre to explore Native American identity politics (and) achieved a greater sense of what artistic expression can be done within the genre of horror.”

‘I just love writing’

Jones never has a plan or an outline or any idea of where his writing is going to go, when he begins a new story.

He simply sits down at his keyboard and begins writing. Jones started “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” on Dec. 1, 2023, and finished in 10 weeks. He typically takes six to 10 weeks to write a novel.

Jones also utilized help from friends who are specialists in fields related to his new book, including a literary critic, a historian and an expert in Blackfoot language, who provided him with documents and answered his questions.

“I just love writing, basically…I just am always writing novels and stories, and I’m one of those people who I feel like if I’m not writing, I’m not earning the air I breathe, you know?” Jones said. “So I just always write, and luckily people want to buy it.”

Kuskin said Jones is a “tremendously prolific writer,” who writes a book a year and sometimes has two or three going at once. One time, Kuskin recalled, Jones produced a story in the middle of a flight on an airplane coming back from a conference.

“Stephen has made it to the level of superstardom,” Kuskin said. “What’s amazing about Stephen is he’s the most humble, modest and soft-spoken guy I know. It’s why I love being around him so much.”

Kuskin said part of what makes Jones special is his powerful use of language. He’s a beautiful and smooth writer, Kuskin said, whose writing becomes “more smooth and more silky” over time.

“He’s using the horror genre and he’s packaging it in a way where it just seems like a great story, but in fact he’s opening outwards into a much deeper thought, and if you meditate on it, you really get somewhere,” Kuskin said.

Jones has published roughly 35 books in horror, literary fiction, crime and science fiction. His favorite genre to read and write in is horror.

“With horror, it’s always like, the monster’s gonna eat us, that’s what matters,” Jones said. “The stakes are big. I like that.”

Jones was constantly reading growing up, starting with Louis L’Amour western novels, Conan the Barbarian novels and Mack Bolan books.

He also read Reader’s Digest, National Geographic and Hulk and Spider-Man comic books. Now, most of what he reads is horror. He reads almost exclusively books that are not yet published, since authors often seek book endorsements from him.

“(Writing) feels like insulation against the world,” Jones said. “The news can’t get to you, social media can’t get to you, mowing the lawn can’t get to you. You’re sitting at the keyboard, you’re playing with dragons, and it’s considered work, and that’s really fun.”

‘It feels like a gift’

Jones grew up in West Texas, where his only plan in life was to be a custom farmer and drive a tractor. Instead, he said he became a writer “just completely randomly.”

“Oh, it feels like a gift. It’s amazing,” Jones said. “I never thought I’d live past 27, and here I am, 53, you know. What’s that, like 26 extra years I didn’t plan on having?”

Jones finished high school at an alternative school, which he described as a place kids go when they get in too much trouble and are kicked out of their high school. A big problem was that Jones was chronically truant.

“When I finally got my diploma, my mother took me out to eat, and she gave me a suitcase and she said ‘You gotta get out of town. This town’s gonna kill you.’” Jones said.

“And she was right, ’cause you know, a lot of people I grew up with, that was happening to. And she said, ‘You’ve always been reading books, you need to be among people who read books.’”

His mother had saved enough money to pay for Jones’ first semester of college at Texas Tech University. Jones said he was only going to stay for one semester, but ended up liking it enough to continue. He found jobs and took out loans to pay for it.

“For the first time in my life, I was in a room where a book had been assigned and I wasn‘t the only one in the class who had read it,” Jones said. “Everyone in class had read it, and they talked about it like it mattered, and it just blew my mind.”

Jones’ second semester at Texas Tech marked the moment that would set Jones on the trajectory of becoming a novelist.

He had signed up for a monster class at Texas Tech, initially excited to learn about monsters, werewolves and vampires, and later found out that monster class means a monster-sized class with 450 people.

As he was taking notes one day in class, the police came in and pulled him out.

“But this time it wasn’t because of something I had done, it was because one of my uncles … had been burned terribly badly,” Jones said.

Jones was the only family member the authorities could find, so he was delivered to the burn unit ICU and waited with his uncle for three days. The only thing he had was his pen and spiral notebook from class.

“And so I got bored, wrote a story, and when I came back into class on Monday … I had not written the personal essay I was supposed to write,” Jones said.

His classmates lined up to turn in their essays on the corner of the instructor’s desk, so he pulled out the pages of the story he wrote in the hospital, crimped the top and placed it on the stack.

Despite Jones’ story being off topic and hand-written, not typed, the instructor read it anyway. She passed it on to the creative writing faculty, who liked it enough to type it up themselves and enter it into a departmental creative writing contest, which he won and earned $50.

“That was my first time ever understanding that you could turn lies into groceries, you know?” Jones said. “And so I just kept doing it, and I’m still doing it.”

‘Writing is going to recess’

Jones also never planned to go to graduate school.

He wanted to get his bachelor’s degree and go home and drive a tractor. But his professors kept bugging him about continuing his education. He didn’t even know what graduate school was at the time, and his professors had to explain it to him.

To satisfy his professors, he submitted a single application to an English writing school and a philosophy school. The English program got back to him first, he said, so that’s where he went.

Jones finished his doctorate program at Florida State University within two years, and his first published novel in 2000 was his dissertation. A professor who was on his dissertation committee was also a publisher at a well-respected press and wanted to publish the novel.

“Usually that doesn’t happen, you know?” Jones said. “Usually you flounder about for 15 years.”

Jones remembered his peers scouring job boards to be professors, but he had no interest in that at the time. Jones returned to West Texas after he earned his doctorate and found a job in a warehouse where he was happy to be doing manual labor. But then he hurt his back and had to get a desk job.

He found one at an academic library on campus at Texas Tech, where the people there encouraged him to become a professor. Since the pay was a bit better, he applied.

In 2007, he was still teaching at Texas Tech when CU Boulder called and recruited him to Boulder. He joined the faculty in CU Boulder’s English department in 2008.

Despite never wanting to become a professor, Jones said he enjoys teaching. He teaches intermediate and advanced fiction workshops, graduate fiction workshops, studies in fiction and a repeating monsters course. In the graduate seminar, he picks his topics and hasn’t yet done the same one twice. He’s taught classes on westerns, vampires, haunted houses, young adult novels and possession narratives.

“I love getting the lecture together,” Jones said.

“It makes me think about these story types: monsters, creatures, people, characters. It makes me think about them in ordered ways, which helps me with my own writing.”

Jones said he always has stories coming out. Right now, he’s working on writing a new possession novel.

Jones never plans to stop writing, unless perhaps if he ever dreads going to the keyboard, or if it becomes work or a chore.

“To me, it’s always been fun,” Jones said. “Writing is going to recess, you know? It’s getting to play, and who doesn’t want to play all the time?”