Gabino Iglesias Reviews Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

Bad Cree, Jessica Johns (Doubleday 978-0-38554-869-4, $27.00, 272pp, hc) January 2023.

I love reading books that aren’t supposed to work and somehow not only work but they’re good. The ARC of Jessica Johns’s Bad Cree starts comes with a letter from Doubleday Senior Editor Margo Shickmanter talking about how Johns was told by a writing instructor to never write dreams unless she wanted to bore readers. Johns is Cree, and dreams are an important part of Cree traditions, so she wanted to prove the instructor wrong. To do so, Johns wrote a short story about a Cree woman whose dreams affect her waking life. That story won two awards and later became Bad Cree.

Mackenzie wakes up from a nightmare holding a severed crow’s head. Then she blinks and the head disappears. If this were a single strange oc­currence, she could find an explanation or simply ignore it, but waking up holding things from the dream world is something that has been happen­ing to her lately. Also, there are crows outside her apartment all the time and they seem to follow her to work as well. Mackenzie has been dealing with grief and guilt that started with the death of her grandmother and got worse when she lost her sister, and these nightmares, most of which take place in spots she remembers and some of which appear to have links to her past, soon take over her life and keep her from sleeping properly and going to work. When she finally accepts that the nightmares are too much to handle on her own, Mackenzie returns home, but the nightmares and the anger, grief, and guilt that haunt her won’t just go away because she’s back home.

Besides the dreams, which work well and re­minded me of Tananarive Due’s The Between, there are other elements that shouldn’t work that Johns makes work for her in this novel. For start­ers, the novel is narrated in present tense, which gives it an undeniable sense of immediacy. How­ever, more than half the narrative has to do with dreams, and most of the time when Mackenzie is awake, the story is about her memories. The constant shifting between past, present, memory, and dream could’ve been confusing, but Johns pulls it off. Also, there’s a mixing of dream world and reality here that is often tricky to pull off, but Johns does it well by adding enough detail to make it believable but also allowing incredulity to be part of the equation.

Bad Cree is the kind of horror novel that might make some readers uncomfortable with its few scenes of death and occasional bursts of gore, but it’s much more than that. While the author set out to prove that instructor wrong about the dreams, the essence of this novel is deeply rooted in Cree culture. Mackenzie has a hard time accepting what she’s experiencing, but conversations with family back home open her eyes to the many ways in which Cree people see dreams, death, reality, and even the future. With this, Johns joins a stellar group of Native American writers like Stephen Graham Jones, Erika T. Wurth, and Shane Hawk in bringing her heritage and culture to the page and sharing it with the world.

There is enough fear, tension, and dark visions in this novel to call it horror, but its strengths are the way the author focuses on Mackenzie and the women in her family and the ease with which she shows how accepting Cree culture is of things that, for other cultures, would be considered crazy, unreal, or otherworldly.

Bad Cree is a strong debut from a “Nehiyaw auntie,” and it’s a book that will should place Johns on many readers’ radars.

This review and more like it in the July 2023 issue of Locus.

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