THE FISHERMAN’S GIFT, by Julia R. Kelly

“The Fisherman’s Gift” begins with a child washed up on a Scottish beach after a storm in 1900. A fisherman, Joseph, finds the boy, and carries him through the local village, Skerry Sands, past the shop where the novel’s Greek chorus of housewives gather, to the minister, who in time entrusts the boy to the schoolteacher Dorothy. Dorothy’s own son, Moses, disappeared in a similar storm several years earlier when he was just 6 years old. In an early sign of the novel’s difficulties, this stranger child is sometimes uncannily like and at other moments obviously different from Moses.

While the boy is with Dorothy, the story of Moses’ conception, birth and disappearance returns to the center of village life and conversation. Dorothy is not a Skerry native; she moved to the fishing village to teach, and her limited social skills and professional status meant that she has remained an outsider, especially after the breakdown of her marriage to a village man, and after she raised and lost her child in the community. She has remained aloof from the village women; in turn they regard her with suspicion and resentment, particularly for her ambiguous relationship with the otherwise eligible Joseph.

The novel’s plot is simple: A stranger comes to town, and then a stranger child comes to town. It’s a good engine for unraveling the stories buried in an isolated village, and in “The Fisherman’s Gift” there are many tales lurking underneath the animating mystery. They include the daughter of a violent marriage resisting her own violent husband; several women more and less maddened by grief for sons and brothers lost at sea; mothers with too many children and some with children lost; men struggling to fulfill their required roles on land and sea.

The village of Skerry is nicely realized, and Kelly describes the sea and weather vividly. The story is well paced and the dialogue strong, always a challenge with dialect speech from long ago.

But there are flaws in craft and focus. The omniscient narrator treads heavily, often in prominent sentence fragments pointing out the obvious. A chapter begins, “And there are other things she must face in this moment of truth in her life.” A paragraph between two reflections is, “How much has happened since.” These things shouldn’t, and in fact don’t, need flagging. And there are repetitions of images and phrases, to which we are all prone but they shouldn’t make it to publication. Three times someone’s instinct for mishap is compared to “the way you know when you knock at a door that no one’s home.” Small matters, maybe, but the cumulative effect is a distracting clumsiness.

Furthermore, there is fundamental indecision about what kind of book this is. The novel gestures toward fable and fantasy, first hinted at with an epigraph from Yeats’s “The Stolen Child.” Fine; there are some excellent recent novels that play with North Atlantic folklore to explore community, individualism and the powers of the natural world.

But “The Fisherman’s Gift” invokes the supernatural and then strives to provide realist explanations at every turn. The story depends heavily on coincidences, including a minor character apparently brought in solely to fall off a bicycle with an important telegram as Dorothy happens to be passing. A full investment in folklore would obviate the need for such far-fetched events. And still there are clunky omens (lucky wedding salt spilled as Dorothy’s ill-fated husband carries her over the threshold on her wedding day, dreams and sleepwalking that foreshadow disaster) and a central resolution in supernatural terms.

This feels, in the end, like a promising novel that needed more conviction. It is not without strengths — the characters and setting are memorable — but the magic and rationalism undermine each other, leaving the reader frustrated by both.

THE FISHERMAN’S GIFT | By Julia R. Kelly | Simon & Schuster | 355 pp. | $28.99

THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER, by Stephen Graham Jones

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.

THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER | By Stephen Graham Jones | Saga Press | 435 pp. | $29