-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Novel
by Jessica Johns
Book Reviewed by:In this gripping, horror-laced 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—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
Traveling 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?
In its structure, pacing and ideas, Bad Cree is a substantial and well-built story; in the specifics of its prose, it sometimes loses flow, such as in its overstuffing of adverbial phrases between lines of dialogue and its occasional plodding description of actions. But it thrives in playful and sharp turns of phrase. In resisting simplistic, popular ideas about dreams and symbolism, Johns also resists the horror trope in which objects or creatures of terror are presented as obvious metaphors for mental illness or trauma, existential voids that need to either be filled or excised. This is evident in the novel's refutation of different ideas of "badness." As she has long avoided her familial obligations, MacKenzie struggles with the feeling that she is a "bad Cree," but she also comes to realize that badness itself is not a singular condition or something that necessarily needs to be compensated for or repaired...continued
Full Review
(758 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Jessica Johns, the author of Bad Cree, is a member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Northern Alberta. The Cree, or ininiw, who also refer to themselves as nêhiyawak (Plains Cree), nihithaw (Woodland Cree) and nèhinaw (Swampy Cree), are the largest group of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and live in areas stretching from Alberta to Quebec. Below are a few other recent novels written by Cree authors.
A Minor Chorus (2022) by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Billy-Ray Belcourt, an acclaimed poet and memoirist from the Driftpile Cree Nation, published his debut novel A Minor Chorus in 2022. Like Bad Cree, A Minor Chorus features a first-person narrator who has been living in a city and returns home to rural Alberta. This unnamed main ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Bad Cree, try these:
by J. Nicole Jones
Published 2025
A dreamy California Gothic about a woman who moves to the mysterious town of Bellinas to save her marriage, only to be swept up in a hedonistic cult that isn't what it seems
by Louise Erdrich
Published 2022
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.
To make a library it takes two volumes and a fire. Two volumes and a fire, and interest. The interest alone will ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Eden Robinson, author of the Trickster Trilogy
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.
