Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams—and make them more dangerous.
What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina’s death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?
Going into the new year, I’m hoping to get a little better at writing reviews a bit closer to when I finish a book. I have a tendency to fall way behind, and a lot of the details about a book will fade from my memory quite quickly (I wish my memory was different, but it is what it is…it’s also the primary reason I keep this blog active, so I have at least some record of my impressions of a book).
I just finished BAD CREE the other day and oof…I felt like I needed a couple days to breathe & get my feelings in order. Because I think this might be one of the most (if not THE most) painfully raw, grief-fueled horror novels I’ve ever read.
This is the debut novel by Jessica Johns (a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta). I was mesmerized by BAD CREE from the first page & it had me in its grip until the end. This book is just gorgeous, haunting, and absolutely gut-wrenching & unflinching in its portrayal of grief.
Mackenzie is a young Cree woman living in Vancouver. She left her Northern Alberta family home after the devastating loss of her kokum (grandmother). In the two years she’s been living in Vancouver, one of her sisters, Sabrina, also tragically passed away. Mackenzie couldn’t bring herself to return home for Sabrina’s funeral, and has been living in this kind of fugue/despondent state.
After a series of relentlessly haunting nightmares that seem to be blurring the lines between her waking life and the dream world, Mackenzie finally realizes she needs the help of her family.
Johns really captures the strange vibe of returning home where like…things feel somehow exactly the same & totally different, all at once. Mackenzie’s family is an incredibly tightly-knit one, but there’s also a fair amount of secret-keeping that’s been happening over the years. Some truths that need uncovering to help Mackenzie get through things.
BAD CREE is a very quietly unsettling horror novel. It’s not terribly violent or gory, and chapters will go by and it will feel more like a contemporary family drama. But then, fucking hell…there will just be some deeply disturbing moment or imagery that’s so hard to shake off. This one gets under your skin.
More than anything, BAD CREE is about the messiness of grief. The horror of grief. That part of this book resonated so loudly with me & parts of BAD CREE were almost physically painful for me to read.
This is such a special book & for sure one of my favorite reads of the year. It’s moody, queer, cathartic, strange, and heartbreakingly beautiful. I loved this one so much.
Grimdark Dad 