Bad Cree
by Jessica Johns
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Pub Date 9 Feb 2023 | Archive Date 31 Jan 2023
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Description
In this gripping debut, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community, and the land they call home.
When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow’s head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.
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 — crows stalk her every move around the city; she gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina — Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
Travelling 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 her?
Advance Praise
‘In evocative yet understated prose, Jessica Johns weaves a captivating tale of love, loss, the violence of greed, and the healing power of family. In Bad Cree, Johns delivers a suspenseful and thought-provoking page turner you won’t want to put down.’ – Michelle Good, #1 bestselling author of Five Little Indians
‘Bad Cree deftly explores the permeable boundaries of dreams, reality, and culture, as well as complex family dynamics and relationships. A compelling novel that is a mystery and a horror story about grief, but one with defiant hope in its beating heart.’ – Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Pallbearers Club
‘Bad Cree is a masterwork of creeping tension. Wry, moody, and subversive, Johns explores the power of connections, both the harm and the healing, with characters rich and warm, tangled in each other, to the land and to the supernatural. Couldn’t put it down.’ –Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781914484612 |
| PRICE | £14.99 (GBP) |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Siobhan D, Reviewer
Bad Cree is a novel about a woman whose unnerving dreams lead her to return home and confront the death of her sister. Mackenzie is a young Cree woman living in Vancouver, spending time with her friend Joli and hardly speaking to her family. When her dreams result in her waking up with a crow's head in her hands, and they feature memories of the campsite in the woods where she went with her twin sisters and cousin, she knows she has to speak to her family again, and face the death of one of her sisters that she's been avoiding. But when she returns home, the dreams continue, and Mackenzie and her family must face what happened at the campsite by the lake.
Told from Mackenzie's point of view, the book draws you into not only the world of her creepy dreams and the threat within, but also her waking world, in which she is trying to survive without thinking of her grief or the family she has run from. There's a lot of things explored in the book, not only grief and family, but also use of the land, addiction, and generational trauma, but it is at its heart Mackenzie learning to reconnect with her family and solve the mystery of her dreams, both of which are connected. I liked how it combined horror and coming of age elements alongside Cree traditions and modern day realities, bringing layers to the book, and it is also very readable with great characters (I particularly liked Mackenzie's friend Joli and sister Tracey).
Hannah P, Book Trade Professional
Without a doubt this will be one of my favourite books of 2023. Unnerving and sinister, Jessica Johns' writing digs its talons into you - a chilly fever dream that unpicks family dynamics and generational trauma against a body-horror backdrop. The horror aspect is deliciously gradual, with sinister omens and eerie happenings creeping their way into the story until they reach a shivering crescendo as the barrier between Mackenzie's dreams and reality erodes completely. With touches of Julia Armfield and Daisy Johnson at their most unsettling, this is a book that haunts, that ensnares and that is bound to stick in the consciousness of anyone that reads it for a very long time.
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