Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
This brilliant, searing debut Indigenous horror explores family secrets, grief, and intergenerational trauma with prose that is at turns dream-like and candid. The novel opens with Mackenzie, a young Cree woman, who wakes from a dream about fighting off crows clutching a crow's head in her hands. Recently, crows have haunted Mackenzie both in the waking world and in her dreams. They follow her to her job at Whole Foods, she hears them outside her tiny apartment's window, and they wing their way into her dreams. Every dream takes place during a moment from Mackenzie's past, when Mackenzie, her late sister Sabrina, and her cousin Kassidy sensed something strange about the woods near a camping site their family frequented. Sabrina, now dead from a brain aneurysm, was briefly lost in the woods, and she's in every one of Mackenzie's dreams now. Mackenzie never let herself mourn for her sister. She fled her claustrophobic family and small town in northern Alberta after her grandmother's death for Vancouver and decided not to return home for Sabrina's funeral. Her refusal to grieve and to mourn with the family has caused a rift between them and her. However, when she begins receiving texts from someone claiming to be Sabrina, she knows she needs to go home to get advice from her aunties and mother, even though home is the last place she wants to be.
Central to the narrative is the unique and richly drawn relationships between Mackenzie and her Cree female relatives. Her family is consistently loving, always up in everyone's business, yet also secretive about their pasts. It's their very closeness that drove Mackenzie to flee after her grandmother's death, which devastated her. Mackenzie couldn't begin to process her sister's death so shortly after her grandmother's. But now she must grapple with her grief, the dreams that are slowly driving her mad, and the unfinished threads between herself and the rest of her family: her taciturn mother, her sister Tracey, her cousin Kassidy, and her aunties. All these women and their combined Cree wisdom will be crucial to helping Mackenzie tackle why Sabrina has begun to haunt her and what to do about it.
While family relationships take center stage, this is still a horror novel with some profoundly unsettling and uncanny scenes. Johns deftly entwines familial conflict with supernatural horror. It's a gorgeous meditation on family and grief steeped in Cree culture and will surely be one of my favorite horrors of the year. If you want to read more recent Indigenous horrors or supernatural thrillers by women, be sure to check out White Horse by Erika T. Wurth and Shutter by Ramona Emerson, two of my favorite books from last year. —Margaret Kingsbury
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