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Bad Cree

Bad Cree

It starts with the crows. In the dreams of her dead sister in a wood that fill Mackenzie with existential dread and eventually put her life on hold, she is most haunted by the crows. Jessica Johns’ first novel Bad Cree opens with the crow’s head in Mackenzie’s hands that she brings from her dream into her flat. It is followed by a surge of appearances the crows make outside Mackenzie’s flat in Vancouver and the Wholefoods she works in. When she eventually returns to her Nehiyawak family and to the Alberta prairies, the crows have become more like messengers and even supporters to her. They accompany her, and Mackenzie shares her life and her stories again with her sister, her cousin, her aunties and her mother. She realises that all of them live with dreams that literally have a life of their own. Terrifyingly, there has been an evil force at the dreams’ centre and behind her sister’s death. 

By then, Mackenzie sees that the colonisers’ treatment of the land and of her people has made grief her family’s heritage, unfolding through generations of women: oil companies, dreaded encounters the women in her family have with white men, and Nehiyawak voices eclipsed by the white culture of, for example, a Wholefoods job. If this feels familiar, the vampiric creature that has entered Mackenzie’s family and that has sent her home is also linked to the greed of the colonial enterprise. Through Mackenzie’s own dreams as well as her sister’s and her cousin’s, her mother’s and her aunties’ dreams, the creature rages into the real world to destroy life until the women’s – and the crows’ – fight against it begins to offer some hope. 

            The suspense and the horror imagery are part of a story that made me want to read on and live in Mackenzie’s powerfully sensory and visual world, even if the speed of the narrative is sometimes much slower than the genre fiction elements suggest. That Mackenzie does quite a lot of googling of information about dreams and mythical creatures and uses a Cree language app made the narrative feel a little flat at times. The novel with its often beautiful language is most forceful as a story of trauma, with the desperate piecing together of dreams and perceptions that comes with it. The mostly very familiar images and figures of horror work not so much to scare readers but mainly as symbols for a psychological journey. It is, after all, very scary and painful when life becomes too hard to live because of the cost of trauma, as it does for Mackenzie at the novel’s outset in Vancouver. Or when sisters and cousins turn against each other in a Zombie-like fashion because long-lived colonial greed pulls the strings. Yet in this novel, the siblings’ bond at the lake in the prairies eventually remains strong. 

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