BAD CREE by Jessica Johns

BAD CREE

Jessica Johns (jessicasbjohns.com)

Scribe (scribepublications.co.uk)

£14.99

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Mackenzie wakes from a vivid dream with a severed crow’s head in her hands. Moments later, it has vanished into thin air. It’s not the first item she has brought back from her dreams, and it won’t be the last. The waking world is proving to be equally disturbing: crows are following her every move, perched on a street lamp outside her apartment window. As the dreams become more intense, Mackenzie returns to her family home in Alberta and the dreams suddenly take on a more concrete form: they’re a reminder of a night, not long before the death of her older sister, at their lakeside holiday camp. As Mackenzie and her remaining sister, along with their cousin, try to piece together what her dreams are trying to tell her, Mackenzie tries to put her life, and her family, back together, but it’s a race against time, and against a sinister enemy.

Severed crow’s head aside, Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree doesn’t really feel like a horror novel until well into the second half. This is a story about family and the many ways in which we can hurt those we love the most. Mackenzie, through whose eyes we watch this story unfold, has moved hundreds of miles from her family to get some space and some perspective on life. Both her older sister – a twin – and her grandmother have died in the recent past, though Johns doesn’t tell us right away whether either or both predate her westward flight, or whether either has anything to do with said flight. With the help of her friend Joli, she tries to deal with the strange dreams and the even stranger shadows she has picked up, constantly under the watchful beady eyes of a murder – and how appropriate is that word? – of crows. Things eventually come to a head, and she is forced to return to her roots, tail firmly between her legs.

Mackenzie’s homecoming proves Robert Frost’s assertion that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ they have to take you in.” Her family is a matriarchy, with the “aunties” behind every single decision, and forming the solid core of the household. Instead of feeling comforted by her homecoming, and the loved ones she is surrounded by, Mackenzie’s dreams get worse and she begins to receive anonymous text messages that seem to come from her dead sister, Sabrina. The dreams, she eventually decides, are trying to tell her something, and whatever it is won’t be over until she returns to the family’s lakeside campsite. From this point, Bad Cree takes a sudden turn into much darker territory, with indigenous folklore playing a central role.

Johns’ debut novel, expanded from an earlier short story of the same name, provides unique insights into the lives of Canada’s First Nation inhabitants, even if shown through the lens of the horror genre. The central conceit allows plenty of room to examine Mackenzie and her family, while the characters feel like living, breathing people (reading the author’s afterword, it seems that they might, in fact, be living, breathing people). The story grips from page one, taking the slow-build approach towards darkness and horror, without sacrificing any of the more “mundane” aspects of the tale: reconciliation, family and collective memory. Bad Cree is an extremely accomplished first novel and Jessica Johns is a writer of huge potential. This is the future of the horror genre and it fills this old horror fan with hope.