Review: 'White Horse'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

White Horse
By Erika Wurth
Horror
Flatiron Books

The late horror writer Peter Straub once told me, in an online interview, that he decided to write in that genre because of the freedom is gave him to write about all kinds of things. One short story of his in particular, about a boy who was bullied, showed me how true his statement was.

Among the indigeneous authors now writing in the horror genre, doing the same thing, is Erika Wurth. Her novel, White Horse, is ostensibly about what happens when a bracelet with power is brought to the protagonist. But this story is about a lot more, and it is a story told well.

Kari James has reached equilibrium in her once rowdy, rebellious life. She's still no pushover, but she has cleaned up her act and works long hours at two waitress jobs. Time off includes hanging out at the White Horse, a rundown Denver tavern that has a long history of catering to both urban and tribal Indians, reading horror novels and petting the saloon's cats while sipping beer or whisky. She's still recovering from the long ago deaths of her best friend and her mother.

That equilibrium is disrupted when her cousin Debby, who has a history of pestering Kari into not destroying herself, brings her a bracelet that belonged to Kari's mother. Her mother disappeared when she was two days old, and Kari has spent the last 30-some years angry at her. That her father suffered an accident that destroyed his brain in mourning her doesn't help. The moment Kari touches the bracelet, she sees ghosts from her past. First it's Jaime, her best friend who OD'd when they were partying hard, then her mother. Her mother's ghost is accompanied by the specter of evil following close behind.

Wurth is wonderful at describing what Kari and Jaime were like in their wild days, growing up in Idaho Springs, wishing for more, whatever that might be, and why Kari will always love heavy metal rock.

We'd hitched one Saturday night, ready for adventures of the kind that could not be had in a small town that sat at the bottom of a mountain, the trees swaying above our trailers, our dingy houses, our wild, furious hearts.

As the story progresses, Wurth uses the tropes of horror to tell the story of a young Indian woman who disappeared just when it looked like she had everything to live for -- a husband she loved, a new baby, a political cause. And this fits so well. The real-life monsters who abuse women, who kill them, who are frightened of them having a voice, are no less menacing than a grim paranormal creature of death. And because this is a horror novel, just as in magic realism, they are intertwined.

White Horse reaches its full narrative power as it becomes a story of individual indigeneous women and men who form alliances, who forge communities, who recognize their connections to each other as family.

Erika Wurth joins the company of such powerful storytellers as Stephen Graham Jones, Rebecca Roanhorse and Cheri Demiline, and authors who sometimes use the tropes of horror/magic realism such as the great Louise Erdrich, Richard Wagamese, Morgan Talty and Cynthia Letitch Smith.

They acknowledge the spiritual in life as well as the physical and emotional. They take full adantage of the folklore roots of horror storytelling to explore psychological aspects of the indigenious experience. They create characters to care about and insights into their experiences. This is storytelling to treasure.

Review: 'Night of the Living Rez'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Night of the Living Rez
By Morgan Talty
Literary Fiction Short Stories
Tin House

A young boy, living on the Penobscot reservation with his older sister and mother, gets older but doesn't seem to grow up in a beautifully written set of connected stories. Morgan Talty's Night of the Living Rez centers on David, or Dee, at different ages in a non-linear arrangement. Talty takes advantage of that narrative construction choice to show how, regardless of what is going on in our young narrator's life, there are some constants that affect everything about his life and the lives of his family and friends.

These constants are mostly not positive, which makes the positive parts stand out all the brighter. The stories also show how strongly connected the positive and not-positive are. In "The Blessing Tobacco", a young David visits his grandmother at her house. She is starting to suffer from Alzheimer's and thinks David is her long-dead brother, Robbie. 

Grammy keeps passing him cigarettes at the kitchen table. He hasn't smoked and is pretty sure he'd get in trouble if he did, but his mother told him to just go along with Grammy if she wasn't herself. So he smokes them and she keeps passing more to him, getting more insistent that he smoke them. So of course he's soon sick. Turns out Grammy was punishing Robbie for taking something that happened years before David was even born.

His mostly quiet mother and his usually distressed sister nurse him and he is sent back to fill his grandmother's wood box. The slight guilting, the quiet back-and-forth conversation that sends him back and the ensuing chat with his grandmother are realistically and quietly portrayed. It is real life. As they sit back down at the kitchen table, Grammy is herself and tells David a joke he finds so funny that he has her repeat it.

When Grammy has a bad spell later, the arguing that David's mother and sister had been doing is dropped as they unite in taking care of of their elder. She again mistakes David for her dead brother. Later, David dreams that he knew Robbie and has memories of them hunting or fishing together. The way the end of the story is written is indicative of why this book can take hold of one's heart and head:

"... and after all that we walked away through mud or snow until I stopped walking but he kept on going and going and going out there in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest until he was gone."

Gone in more ways than one.

David spends a lot of time with his friends. Whether they're playing an elaborate game of sticks and stones, or smoking, drinking and even doing drugs, the boys are together or looking for each other. They are just as apt to steal from each other as they are to give each other things. It's fascinating that they don't hold grudges and fall right back into hanging out together. David even spends significant time living at their houses when he and his mother cannot abide each other.

His father is mostly out of the picture. David's parents divorced when he was quite young and his dad moved away. He isn't a good provider and doesn't come to visit his kids, but when something goes wrong someone usually reaches out to call him and make him part of what's happening. And one of the other family members shuts him out. Again, the pattern is repeated.

The other major character is Frick, his mother's boyfriend who first appears in his role as a medicine man when Paige has a crisis. His role within the family has a most definitive trajectory:

He was a medicine man who had been forgetting to pray in the mornings and at night, forgetting to feed the spirits once a month.

For the most part, the fights and quarrels and bickering and hurtful things separate the characters. But then something comes up and, for the most part, they are there for each other. Throughout everything that happens to each family member in Night of the Living Rez, that love underneath the trauma holds:

Mom had driven fast. Real fast, and she watched me most of the time during the drive, as if I had been her road the whole way to our new home.