Bad Cree: A Novel
“The significance of the dreams and the meaningful role they play in the plot is well done as is the blending of Cree mythology. . . . . Bad Cree is an engaging read with well-drawn characters that is worth the effort.”
Jessica Johns’ debut novel Bad Cree is an engaging supernatural horror offering steeped in Cree folklore and culture. It explores the theme of grief and makes significant usage of the protagonist’s dreamworld as an integral and important part of the story.
Mackenzie is a young Cree woman who moved away from her family three years ago. She is struggling to come to terms with her grief from the deaths of both her sister Sabrina and beloved Grandmother Kokum. This grief and Mackenzie’s inability to deal with it has isolated her from her family.
Mackenzie is beset by recurrent dreams that bleed over into her waking life. In one, Mackenzie wakes up from a battle with a murder of crows with a severed crow head in her bleeding hand. In another, she manages to bring back a twig from a tree. Both items soon disappear causing her to question their legitimacy. The descriptions that Johns uses in these early dream scenes are haunting and evocative:
“Sabrina’s heart, exposed to the world, beat and beat and beat. The crow finally stopped its pecking to look at me. Its dark eyes reflected the moon above us, another hole in the chest of the world.”
All of the dreams take Mackenzie back to a weekend at the family lake side campsite with her sister Sabrina. The weekend is shrouded in her memory, hinting of something that happened prior to Sabrina’s death. Mackenzie gets more evidence to the truth of her dreams as a murder of crows begins to follow her around the city. When she gets a text message from someone claiming to be Sabrina, Mackenzie knows that she must return home and face her past.
She goes back to her hometown in Alberta to be with her family. All of them are still coming to terms with the grief both from Sabrina’s passing and the death of Mackenzie’s grandmother, and there is some resentment toward Mackenzie for not attending Sabrina’s funeral, the resentment coming particularly from Sabrina’s twin Tracey.
After Mackenzie’s return home, the dreams become more graphic, visceral, and eventually life threatening. Ultimately Mackenzie needs to remember what really happened that night at the lake and what that had to do with her sister Sabrina’s death, a resolution that leads her, her cousin Cassidy, and Tracey to a life and death struggle with a mythical creature, the Wheetigo.
The significance of the dreams and the meaningful role they play in the plot is well done as is the blending of Cree mythology. But after the return home. the story languishes in the middle. There is no significant escalation that would add to the tension and stakes of climactic scene of the battle with the Wheetigo. And while at times the images and writing is evocative and gripping, often the sentence structures are repeated, and at times the writing sacrifices emotion for formality. Nonetheless, Bad Cree is an engaging read with well-drawn characters that is worth the effort.