A review by ceallaighsbooks
Bad Cree, by Jessica Johns
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
“You can always tell the time of day in Vancouver by the crows… They move through the sky like a thunder cloud, collecting more kin as they fly home. I stand and watch from the entrance of my apartment as a murder forms on a thick, old cedar, much too early for the crows to be roosting… The crows’ calls slice in from all directions, from the city and the ocean, as they take over every limb of the tree, their bodies black out all the green of the leaves. A swarm of warnings. If I didn’t know any better, I would swear it was the reckoning.”
TITLE—Bad Cree
AUTHOR—Jessica Johns
PUBLISHED—2023
PUBLISHER—Doubleday
GENRE—literary horror; folk horror; literary contemporary fiction
SETTING—Turtle Island: Vancouver & Alberta
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—dreams & nightmares, visions & seeing-powers, Cree (& Squamish & Métis & other Indigenous) lifeways & worldviews, crows, grief & guilt, very positive familial love & matriarchal/sisterly relationships, wintery atmosphere, death & mourning, wheetigo—born of the evils of colonization & capitalism, inherited trauma, wholesome horror, the “badness”
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—So many themes, settings, and motifs that resonated with me it was almost unsettling. A perfect book.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PREMISE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
EXECUTION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“I never learned how to swim but I still wonder what it feels like to be held by another body without fear.”
My thoughts:
The book opens with the MC waking up from a nightmare—one of many that she has been having lately and the implications of which make up the main parts of the book’s plot—with an opening paragraph that includes the line: “I yank off my blanket, heavy like I’m pulling it back from the past…” Unlike a lot of the contemporary horror lit I’ve been reading lately, the writing style of Johns’s whole book is gorgeous and poetic while giving up nothing of the plot’s flawless pacing or the story’s spiritual and philosophical depth.
This book drew me in immediately. The story of the book had that slowburn folkhorror feel to it that I love and the specific imagery the author used was the perfect combination of original and new while keeping the very best of the genre-specific vibes. The telling of the story is done with a lot of flashbacks and I thought the pacing throughout was very well-managed.
I especially loved the way Johns wrote the dreams and nightmares scenes. They were so vivid and sensual that I was able to picture everything perfectly and it was absolutely chilling. In fact, the visual images conjured by the author’s writing were all incredibly powerful. I could see this being made into an incredibly beautiful film adaptation.
I would recommend this book to fans of more femme-centric folkhorror lit with particularly beautiful writing. This book is best read while cozy and warm somewhere in the winter, in a place where there are crows, or camping by a lake. 👀
Final note: So yeah, I binged this book in nearly twenty four hours. I’d been struggling with horror lit lately but the writing style and folk spiritual elements of this story are exactly my preference for this genre so this one was a homerun for me.
“I feel a hand on my back, and I know by the pressure it’s Kassidy’s. ‘Plus, whatever bad is passed down, the good lives in our blood, too. We’re fucking magic, man. Look at all we can do with our dreams.’”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CW // animal death (not the dog 😅), grief, body horror, colonialism & capitalism (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Further Reading—
- THE SENTENCE, by Louise Erdrich—TBR
- TAAQTUMI, compiled by Neil Christopher
- FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER, by Angeline Boulley
- WHITE MAGIC, by Elissa Washuta
- ROOT MAGIC, by Eden Royce
Favorite Quotes—
(And just in case you thought I was over-hyping how beautiful this book is, hereeee are some quotes! 😆 —getchya tissues ready—)
(The continuation of the quote I opened my review with:) “A man from my building, whom I know only from the laundry room, comes out front to watch them, too. “Must be an owl close,” he says. I don’t respond but he clarifies anyways. “They’d only get together like this for an enemy.” I think back to my dream and a fact I’ve known forever. “They come together if one of their own dies,” I say. “Yeah,” he says, “but not just to mourn. They gather for revenge. To find who killed their friend.” I want to tell him that nehiyawak have an enemy in ôhô. That they mean death for us Cree people, too. But I already know the white-man reaction to information like this. And I know the crows aren’t looking for an owl, they’re looking for me.”
“The ache now is more than a missing. It’s the same hollow feeling of total helplessness I had when I watched as Sabrina turned to ice in front of me.”
“When Mom laid them next to each other, she thought they’d hold hands or move toward each other, the natural pull of having formed in a body together. But they didn’t reach out. They just stared and stared like it was the first time they’d ever met. Two pieces of skin on either side of an open wound considering how to reconnect again.” (—on the birth of the MC’s twin sisters like isn’t that the most **devastating** thing you have read in YOUR LIFE??)
“Trails spread through the woods like mycelium underground, like veins across a body, connecting everything in every direction: to and away from the lake, running along the length of the water, and sometimes, I swear, right up into the sky. We probably walked every one of those trails a hundred times, but that doesn’t mean we ever grew tired of them.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Mom yelled, “we’ll make sure to get everything cleaned and set up.”
“Thanks, my girl.” Kokum waved behind her. “We’re just gonna walk for a couple High Prairie minutes.” That’s what kokum used to call walking the trails through the woods.
Mom rolled her eyes. “Well, how long is that?”
“The minutes take as long as they need to!”
A minute to her was the distance between two trail openings on the lake. No two openings in particular. It was just the amount of time it took to get from one trail leading from the woods to the water and the next one. Sometimes these openings were only a few feet apart, sometimes they took forever.”
“This is how I learned the trails around the lake, how I started to make myself a part of their paths. Before we had the wagon, we’d just walk, and she’d point out plants and what they could do, tell us stories and jokes.”
“An Indian dying is like a balsam fir getting chopped down. Trees for miles and miles feel the pain under the soil.”
“I thought that I could leave the bad behind. But I guess the bad isn’t a thing you can run from, because it’s not a thing that can be held. It doesn’t announce itself, there’s no siren or beacon. Instead, it’s a steady beating, like a heart or a drum. It’s a sound that lives in the body and grows down into the ground.”
“That’s the best and worst thing about being connected to everything: you are a part of it all, but you can’t choose what gets sent out into the world. Or what can find you.”
“It’s the bad that has been passed down and passed down and passed down, that weaves itself into the marrow of our bones. A bad inflicted on us, one we have no business carrying. But it’s heavy. And we’re all just coping with it in the ways we know how.”
“I… wonder why I started on research that points to the answer being something outside myself, something that happened to me, instead of something that was inside me all along.”
“I worry that this place, the solitude of my life in this apartment, in this city, has turned my memories monstrous. That loneliness can make once-beautiful things terrifying.”
“That’s the thing about abandoned places: they get reclaimed one way or another.”
“But the knowing sits at the corner of my eye socket, a black speck of understanding that is still too far away to see clearly.”
“This place wasn’t built to believe us, and white people will try to stamp out anything they don’t understand.”
“I spent the hour-and-a-half flight staring out the window at the snow-tipped mountains, thinking about the marvel of something so big suddenly appearing small, just because of distance.”
“I knew I was bad for not feeling more reverence about death, for not holding the understanding of how it worked for nehiyawak. All I could see was a deep crater in the ground and the people left behind grasping at the edges.”
“The knowing doesn’t live in my brain, though, like most people think. It lives in my gut.”
“Hurt lives with us always. Like dirt under our fingernails.”
“It feels bad to be loved this much when you don’t think you deserve it.”
“I wonder if this is our family tradition—tamping down dreams before they have a chance to take shape, cutting off a part of ourselves once the fear sets in.”
“…the secrets they, too, have kept out of fear of not being believed, of not believing themselves, of feeling alone.” 👀
“You never know what kind of hurt is lying in wait if you don’t tend to it right away.”
“I feel a hand on my back, and I know by the pressure it’s Kassidy’s. ‘Plus, whatever bad is passed down, the good lives in our blood, too. We’re fucking magic, man. Look at all we can do with our dreams.’”
“…you can never truly avoid bad luck, even if you know all the rules.”
“‘A bear doesn’t normally go into a populated place to find food. But if it can’t find anything to eat in the woods, it will,’ Auntie Verna says.”
“‘Slow down,’ she says. ‘What else have we got to do with all this time but get it right?’”
“Whatever death the wheetigo had brought to the place seemed to be leaving, though it would still take a while to fully heal.”
“This time our tears are more ceremony than sad.”
😭😭🥹
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Grief, and Animal death