Things I enjoyed in 2026 (Part 3)

Novels The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (2025): This historical (with a modern frame) tackles genocide head-on. The bloody revenge portions don’t quite rise to the level of power fantasy, and the you-are-what-you-eat body horror is overall excellent (if somewhat overplayed by the end). The lack of examination of modern Blackfeet relations with Good Stab reads less as an enticing lacuna than a deliberate illustration that some stories are not for outsiders. The Silent Places by Skyla Dawn Cameron (2020): I don’t read a lot in the Self-Rescuing Woman in Peril thriller subgenre, but I liked this one for its embrace of ambiguity and inevitability. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1846): Spouse has long loved it, I hadn’t read it, and the BBC adaptation was my impetus to do so. (Overall, I think it’s a strong adaptation, with most of the changes boiling down to combining characters or judicious trimming.) I was in the mood for melodrama!!! and was not…