A line from Jessica Johns’ haunting, atmospheric and beautiful debut novel, Bad Cree, has been tumbling around in my head since I set the book down. “That’s the thing about the [prairie]. . . . It’ll tell you exactly what it’s doing and when, you just have to listen.” Johns’ protagonist, a young Cree woman named Mackenzie, tries to hear things she’s been ignoring: grief, her family, the lands she grew up on. But there’s something else lurking just outside her perception, something more dire. Strap in for a dread-filled novel that examines the impact of grief on a small community.
Mackenzie hasn’t been sleeping well. To be more specific, she hasn’t been dreaming well. Every night, her subconscious shows her terrifying things, painful memories and, always, a murder of crows. Soon she notices crows outside her apartment window, following her to work and watching from power lines. Something is wrong, and she fears it has to do with the years-ago death of her sister. Mackenzie’s auntie pleads with her to come home, to be among her people, the Indigenous Cree of western Canada. There, with her mother, cousins and aunties, Mackenzie searches for what haunts her mind. Hopefully she can find it before it finds her.
Bad Cree began as a short story, and it’s still tightly written, brisk and efficient as a novel. Johns does, however, slow down when it comes to themes she clearly cares about, such as female relationships. A bar scene midway through the narrative does a particularly lovely job at enriching the portrayal of the community of women who surround Mackenzie. Their camaraderie shows just how important these relationships can be to people feeling lost or alone.
This web of powerful, positive connections stands out all the more in the face of Bad Cree’s truly frightening moments. The dream sequences are both spectacle and puzzle, a mix of memory and fiction, but it’s clear that something beyond just bad dreams is happening to Mackenzie. The unanswered question of what exactly that is provokes a consistent feeling of dread, and the climax is tense, horrific and exciting.
Bad Cree examines how grief can warp someone, how it can terrorize a person by slowly turning reality into nightmare. But there is also a beautiful hope at the center of Johns’ vision: Grief can be tempered by embracing your community. Alone, Mackenzie is just one person, but by returning home, she becomes a thread in a human fabric, woven together to make something stronger.
Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree examines the impact of grief on a small community, mixing truly frightening moments with warm camaraderie.
Mackenzie, a young Cree woman in Vancouver, British Columbia, is being haunted by her dreams. She returns night after night to the lakefront campsite where her sister, Sabrina, died, and parts of her nightmares are beginning to reach through into reality. Desperate for answers and relief, she returns to her hometown of High Prairie, Alberta, to ask her family for help—but once there, her dreams only grow stronger. We talked to Nehiyaw author Jessica Johns, a member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta, about the lingering nature of loss, Bad Cree’s journey from dream to short story to novel, and what makes a great dive bar.
You mention in the acknowledgements that this story began as a dream that worked its way out onto paper. Before you wrote the first sentence of what would become Bad Cree, what ideas were you certain you would include? From the outset, I knew everything was going to center on this dream phenomenon, that this Cree woman could bring things back and forth from the waking world to the dream world. I didn’t know any of the details around this, like why it was happening or even the character’s name, but I knew that this was going to propel the novel.
I also knew the novel was always going to start with Mackenzie waking up with a crow’s head in her hands, one she was holding moments earlier in her dream. Maybe it’s because I’m an Aries, but there was something about starting in the middle of confusion and chaos that felt absolutely right for this novel.
Bad Cree first took form as a short story. Why did you choose to turn it into a novel? In an interview about their poetry collection, Everything Is a Deathly Flower, the brilliant writer Maneo Mohale said, “I wrote this book because I wanted to sleep. Because there were dogs at my door, and they were awful,” and nothing has ever resonated with me more.
I wrote the short story version of Bad Cree, and that story haunted me. The dogs at my door were the characters, barking. They had more life to live, more places to go, than the short story allowed. So I knew I had to keep writing and expand the story. Like Mohale, I just wanted to sleep again.
“I think losing people we love is one of the most horrific things someone can experience . . .”
One of the themes you explore in Bad Cree is the impact of separation from place, people, traditions, what’s “right” and so on. What drew you to this topic? I think about the generational trauma and effects of the intentional separation of Indigenous peoples from their communities, languages, traditions and families by the Canadian state all the time. I think about it because I don’t have a choice not to.
I also think about the ways in which I, along with many Indigenous peoples separated from the teachings and knowledges that are our inherent rights to know, have tried to connect to that again. I think about the “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong” ways I’ve tried to learn, the mistakes I’ve made, the shame I’ve felt in not knowing, when that shame doesn’t belong to me but to the people and powers who forced this separation in the first place. So I wanted to write characters who go through those same things. Characters who don’t always “do the right thing”—whatever that means—who stumble and struggle and are still loved.
Grief and all the ways the past can haunt the present are major elements of Mackenzie’s arc. Did you find yourself tapping into your own experiences with loss and grief when writing? Did working on this novel lead you to see these experiences or emotions in new ways? I think losing people we love is one of the most horrific things someone can experience, so it makes sense that it’s often an element of horror. I’ve lost many friends and family members, including most recently my papa, Don Smith (my dad’s dad), who passed away as I was writing Bad Cree. I think I’ve been in a perpetual state of grief for many years. And I think, in many ways, I have been grappling with the same things Mackenzie is: trying to make sense of losses that feel impossible to make sense of; trying to continue a life that feels absolutely empty when someone you love leaves it.
I learned a lot more about death from a Cree worldview as I was working on the novel, thanks to teachings from Jo-Ann Saddleback and Jerry Saddleback, such as where our ancestors go once they leave this earth and how we can still honor and connect with them while we’re here. That helped me see my own losses in a new way, and those teachings helped inform the comfort Mackenzie eventually feels with her losses as well.
But there are other layers to the grief in this novel that go unreconciled: ecological grief as the land continues to undergo extraction and abandonment, for example. I think this is also fertile ground for horror because it’s a reflection of real life. It’s a horror we’re currently living.
Horror protagonists are often isolated, but Mackenzie is surrounded by a female support system. Why was it important to you to create this network of women? What did this element of the story open up for you? It was important for me to show how Indigenous women and queer Indigenous people always show up for one another. I’ve never seen a fiercer kind of love and protection than when an aunty goes to bat for someone she loves. It’s terrifying and beautiful.
Mackenzie is surrounded by women and femmes who love her deeply, but it’s a love she’s not willing to accept because she doesn’t think she deserves it. In addition to grief, she feels a lot of guilt for some past choices she’s made. So a big aspect of this novel is seeing if Mackenzie will be accountable to those mistakes and let herself be loved again by people who never stopped.
What section of the novel was your favorite to write? Was there a particularly difficult aspect to get right? I loved writing the gruesome, gory scenes that delve into body horror. They were technically challenging to write, and my Google search bar saw some shit.
I also based Mackenzie’s kokum in the novel off my own kokum, the late Eileen Smith (my mom’s mom). In one scene, Mackenzie’s kokum takes her, her sisters and her cousin on a walk through the woods. Kokum tells stories, points out plants and flowers and names them in Cree. It’s a pretty simple scene about these kids spending time with their kokum, but I loved writing it because I felt like I got to envision another world with my own kokum in it.
I could almost smell the stale beer when I was reading the scenes set at the Duster, the local dive bar. What do you think are the essential elements of a good dive, and did you base it on a real-life spot? Yes! The Stardust (the Duster) is a real-life dive bar my mom used to go to when she lived in High Level, Alberta, before she married my dad. I visited High Level a few years ago, when I was around the same age my mom would have been when she lived there. I went out to the Stardust one night, and I loved thinking about the fact that I was walking around a bar that she had spent time in 20 years earlier, that we’d have different memories of the same place. It’s its own kind of ghost story.
The truth is, I LOVE a good dive bar. I always write them into my stories as places of significance. I think that bars, with the people who frequent them and the stories that live in the walls, are incredibly interesting spaces. As for what makes a good dive: comfy booths, karaoke and at least one working pool table.
Horror takes many forms: from the terror of losing control of one’s mind to another entity, to the fear of things that move around unseen in the night, to the inescapable certainty that one day we all must meet our ends. Each of these stories features a different kind of horror, making for a perfect sampler platter for anyone wanting to dip their toes in the murky depths of dread.
★ Leech
In the far reaches of the North, in a chateau abutting a frozen forest and a forbidding mine, a doctor has died. For the powerful Interprovincial Medical Institute, the worrying thing is not the doctor’s death; the Institute’s bodies die all the time. An ancient parasitic life form, the Institute takes over promising young minds and guides them into the field of medicine; all of the unsuspecting human race’s doctors are being controlled by the Institute. What is worrying is that the Institute isn’t sure how the body stationed in the chateau died. To find out exactly what happened, the Institute sends a new body to investigate the chateau and its denizens. That doctor soon discovers another parasite that could upend life as they know it, threatening both the Institute’s supremacy and the humans it seeks to protect.
Hiron Ennes’ debut novel, Leech, is a chilling study in the the loss of bodily autonomy, the terrors of a frigid winter wood and the undeniable creepiness of ancient homes that have long since fallen into disrepair. Set thousands of years after an apocalypse, Leech is decidedly a gothic novel, complete with seemingly cursed family homes, the dark consequences of human progress and unknown dangers lurking in every crevice and icy forest. Tantalizing references to the monsters of humanity’s past, chiefly destructive airships and killer biological agents, feel almost mythic as they fill readers’ imaginations with possible explanations for what exactly went wrong. Full of trepidation and mystery, Leech is perfect for readers who wished that Wuthering Heights had been just a little more like Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.
Young adult author Ainslie Hogarth’s first novel for adults, Motherthing, opens in the waiting room of an intensive care unit, and it doesn’t get less stressful from there. Ralph and Abby Lamb have moved in with Ralph’s mother, Laura, to help care for her. Plagued by her rocky relationship with her own mother, Abby had hoped to kindle a better relationship with her mother-in-law but was instead met with distrust and cold condescension for being the woman who ‘took” Laura’s son from her. After Laura dies by suicide at the beginning of Motherthing, Abby thinks that her and Ralph’s obligation is over; they will sell the house and move away, free to start the perfect family that they deserve. But when Laura’s spirit begins to haunt the couple, driving Ralph into a pit of depression and tormenting Abby night after night, it is clear that Abby will have to dig deep if she is going to wrest the life of her dreams from the nightmare that her home life has become.
Deeply dark and often funny, Motherthing explores the contours of what it means to be in a relationship with a mother (or mother-in-law) figure and the porous boundaries among grief, anger and the supernatural. Motherthing can be a difficult book to read on an emotional level, given Abby’s frustratingly optimistic “I can fix him/it/this” attitude, but its scares and surprises are well worth the discomfort it causes—as well as the sleepless nights it will engender.
★ Lute
The eponymous island of Lute by Jennifer Thorne stands apart from the modern world. Even as war lingers on their doorstep and climate change and water shortages ravage the lands around them, the islanders are sheltered and seemingly immune to the turmoil. In exchange for these blessings, the island extracts a tithe: Every seven midsummers, exactly seven of the people of Lute die on what is referred to as “The Day.” Nina Treadway, a transplant to Lute and lady of the island by virtue of her marriage to Lord Hugh Treadway, doesn’t believe in the fairy tale, chalking it up to the superstitions of a quaint and isolated island. But as The Day dawns and brings a series of waking nightmares, Nina must accept her duties as the Lady of Lute in order to preserve the stability of the island she has come to love.
Part idyllic fantasy and part Final Destination, Lute asks a question that harks back to works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘the Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”: What is the price of prosperity? While Lute’s citizens have willingly agreed to that price, it is steep and horrific. The novel’s pages are dotted with gore and loss, sure to pull on the heartstrings—and occasionally the stomachs—of even the most stoic of readers. However, despite the bloodshed and tension, Lute is a story of the creation of a haven away from the pressures of the modern world. More cynical readers might balk at the story’s hopeful tone and occasionally predictable plot turns. However, for those looking for a thriller replete with both terror and fantasy, Lute delivers in spades.
Led by Hiron Ennes' chilling debut novel, Leech, these thoughtful, well-crafted frights will scare you on multiple levels.
The Interprovincial Medical Institute is the sole provider of medicine in a post-apocalyptic world. But unbeknownst to anyone, the Institute is a hive mind, a parasite living within, controlling and training the world’s doctors. When one of the Institute’s bodies dies, it sends a new doctor to investigate—and discovers it isn’t the only parasite interested in the human race. We talked to Ennes about fusing gothic literature with sci-fi and the terrifying scientific theory that keeps them up at night.
Parasites aren’t new to speculative fiction and horror, but your choice to tell this story from the perspective of the Institute, a hive mind that is both a medical professional and a parasite, is extremely original. What did writing from that point of view allow you to do as an author? Building a narrator out of a many-minded parasite was not easy, but it let me take advantage of a sort of pseudo-omniscience, which was such a boon for world building. Writing from the Institute’s point of view was also an opportunity to delve into the threat a microscopic antagonist might pose. We all get it, parasites are spooky. That isn’t saying much at all. Where the true intrigue lies, I think, is in the mechanism of infection and the cellular changes that take place in a host. A protagonist needs to be proficient in microscopy to see the terrifying devil in those details.
“Is that DNA truly mine? Am I being parasitized by my own genome?”
The Institute harks back to classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Were there any particular stories that informed your creation of the doctor? At the moment I can’t think of any fiction that influenced me as much as the stories science can tell us about our own cells. I was particularly taken by the theory of endosymbiosis: Deep in our mitochondria lives a strand of DNA separate from our nuclear chromosomes, an essential piece of our cellular network without which we would die. This strand is circular, like a bacterium’s, leading scientists to propose it is the genome of a foreign organism that hitched a ride inside us back when we were single-celled. It’s been sitting there ever since, perpetuating itself through the maternal line and providing the basis of a fun mind game I like to call “Am I even me?” Is that DNA truly mine? Am I being parasitized by my own genome? Does it care about me, or does it only care about my reproductive success? Is everything I do and think at the behest of a little self-interested string of nucleotides living inside me? You stay awake so many nights thinking about stuff like that, and eventually you write Leech.
Bodily autonomy is always going to be a ripe subject for horror, but it is something particularly terrifying for many people right now. What drew you to writing a book that delved so deeply into body horror and questions of bodily and mental autonomy? I knew autonomy would end up being one of several themes, as a consequence of writing about parasitism, but the narrative quickly shoved autonomy to the forefront seemingly of its own volition. Leech was a demanding animal. It wouldn’t let me stop at the microscopic ecosystems parasites use to commandeer behavior but demanded I touch on the equally parasitic structures of hierarchy, power, abuse and some of the ways these structures rob us of our own bodies.
Despite the fact that Leech epitomizes a gothic novel, it’s also set in a post-apocalyptic world. What led you to marry these two genres? To put it simply, I think they work well together. Gothic literature is usually predicated on the exploration of some sordid past, whether of an individual, a family, an old house or an isolated township—often all of the above. If a single dead child can make for a terrifying poltergeist, what hauntings might manifest from the cruel impulses of a dead society? In what ways will human cycles of exploitation, bigotry and imperialism haunt the future? What monstrous forms might their resurrections take?
There’s a definite shift in the language the doctor uses to talk about humans throughout the book, moving from a clinical analysis, to becoming more familiar, to a sort of horror. Can you talk about this shift in language? Was this a conscious decision, or did it develop organically? The shift in language was a conscious development, and an excruciating one. I can’t count the hours I spent going back and forth, micromanaging colloquialisms, contractions, turns of phrase and intrusive thoughts. At the extreme ends of the story, the narration styles are pretty distinct, but it gets muddy enough in the middle that I’m fairly sure I underwent some sort of ego death while writing it.
There are hints as to what happened to society that caused everything to go wrong. Can you tell us what plunged your world into this dark age and how humanity survived? I don’t think there is any one thing that plunged this world into ruin. The collapse of a society is a slow, mundane and brutal process (a process we are currently witnessing in real time). I don’t know how the world ended, or how many times it ended, but I do know humanity survived by virtue of resilience, ingenuity, mutual aid and cooperation. And trains. I suspect the resurgence of the locomotive was vital to the resurgence of human society. I don’t know why. I just feel it in my heart.
How did your background in medicine inform the writing of Leech? Is there anything that you’ve learned in your studies that you wish you could have included that didn’t quite fit? To be honest, my background when I started Leech was in physics. My background when I finished it was in medicine, which definitely informed some of the details but not the core of the story. There are a few aspects of doctoring I might’ve incorporated if I’d had a more solid grasp of the realities of clinical practice—namely, a deeper exploration of the unique and sometimes mystifying relationships people have to their own bodies. I think I touched on this with Hélene’s (perceived) hypochondria, but I have seen some truly fascinating disconnects between internal and external experiences of disease: Munchausen’s syndrome, functional disorders and one case of a lovely, cheerful patient whose stated history painted a picture of health and who, almost as an afterthought, lifted her sweater to show me a massive open wound she had been nursing for nearly a year.
“I’m a utopian at heart . . . “
In gothic literature, deformity and physical differences are often cast as physical manifestations of sin, which is a theme now understood to be ableist at best. You manage to incorporate these bodily differences without that baggage. What drew you to including these elements of the gothic, and how did you navigate including them while avoiding the negative connotations that they usually hold? I won’t claim that Leech is free of ableist baggage; after all, ableism is one of the many flavors in that soup of oppression in which we all grow up swimming. That said, I did consciously set out to subvert traditional, moralistic depictions of deformity. I wanted pretty much every “normal” patient to have some unconventional physical attribute. In a world where everyone has a mechanical limb or a migratory birthmark or a literal doppelganger, it’s hard to view these things as anything but variations of the norm. This allowed the narrative to focus more on the unique roles these attributes play in the characters’ lives and how they might be admired, celebrated, exploited or fetishized on an interpersonal, rather than societal, level.
A few characters speculate about where they think the monstrous, mysterious ventigeaux that stalk the woods near Verdira came from.Do you have an answer, or are they mysterious to you as well? The ventigeaux are a mystery even to me. In the future, if there is an opportunity to dissect them, I might uncover their origins. For now, I share the Institute’s suspicions that they are orphans of biotechnology, but I can’t guess what sort of misguided endeavors led to their creation.
One of your characters tries to make sure that humans don’t regain the ability to make flying machines, believing that they are what caused the apocalypse in the first place. If the denizens of this world recovered lost technologies, do you think they would be doomed to the same self-destruction as their forebears? I’m a utopian at heart, so I genuinely hope not. But I believe that without significantly, consciously dismantling institutions of power, people will end up re-creating the oppressive structures that haunt our past. Not as any function of “human nature” or some such evolutionary psychology nonsense, but by dint of centuries of vicious cultural selection. People tend to emulate their forebears, and the world of Leech is no exception. Fortunately, in that world, as in ours, there are those working to demolish monopolies of power, technology and capital. And in that world, as in ours, there will be monumental successes and devastating failures. Let us hope the former is more frequent than the latter.
Picture of Hiron Ennes courtesy of the author.
We talked to Ennes about fusing gothic literature with post-apocalyptic sci-fi and the terrifying scientific theory that keeps them up at night.
Sign Up
Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
In the author’s latest graphic novel, Oasis, two children seek comfort in a discarded AI robot, while their mother labors in a factory in order to give them a better life.
