Bad Cree by Jessica Johns is a riveting novel that follows Mackenzie, a Cree woman from High Prairie who is unable to outpace her memories.
Having moved from her hometown in Alberta to Vancouver to escape the emptiness created by her sister Sabrina’s death, Mackenzie is nonetheless haunted by dreams that break the boundaries of sleep and start slipping into reality.
After a dream in which she kills a crow and wakes up with that same crow’s head in her hands, Mackenzie makes the journey home again, towards an understanding of herself and her family. But there is something lurking in the woods around High Prairie that is desperately hungry.
Bad Cree is the blockbuster book of this year so far. With the author, Johns, coming up to Yellowknife for the annual Northwords festival and sales of five to twenty books per month at the Yellowknife Book Cellar since its release in January, this book is popular. Its cinematic scenes also make it feel like a movie.
The details that Johns notices, like video game scores in the background of a conversation Mackenzie has with her sister or the way a cigarette’s ashes fall while she is watching her mother provide windows for both Mackenzie and us as readers to glimpse the internal lives of these characters, saying for them what they won’t say out loud.
Creepy and enchanting, Johns’ story centres Indigenous women and non-binary peoples relationships with one another, and its plot pivots on the way that knowledge is shared (or withheld) intergenerationally. While Mackenzie and her family have withheld from one another the almost unexplainable, uncomfortable, and wondrous parts of their heritage, once her aunties and sisters start sharing their stories with one another they are able to find what the commonalities in their dreams are telling them. After reading Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton and Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast by John Vaillant this year, I found that Bad Cree brought similar awareness to the terror created by the petroleum industry in, particularly, Alberta. Johns’ discussion about the extraction of oil from Alberta, and the way that greed creates systems that target vulnerable places, people, and populations in a way that is almost irrevocable, adds a notable voice to the numerous authors and activists that have also been using their platforms to advocate against the kind of industry that creates the fires we’re seeing now.
Atmospheric bone-chilling, Bad Cree is the perfect autumn read. This is a novel that bottles the feeling of being watched — in your home, in your life, and in your dreams — in a way that perfectly crosses multiple genres. This book would feel at home shelved with thrillers and literary fiction and, with the wondrous aspects of Mackenzie’s story, Bad Cree has something brilliant for readers in a wide variety of genres.