Thrilling tale of haunted dreams

ALONE in her unsettlingly quiet apartment, Mackenzie wakes terrified from the latest in a spate of nocturnal journeys. She dreamed she was in a snow-covered forest, leaning over a corpse which was being feasted on by crows.

Even more disturbingly, she seems to have acquired the ability to bring objects from her dreams back into the real world for a short time before they disappear – on this occasion, the head of a crow, which she had torn from its body in fury. As a First Nation Cree, Mackenzie knows better than to dismiss dreams. Wherever she goes in Vancouver, she’s followed by crows, which appear to be keeping her under observation. “This isn’t some unresolved trauma shit,” she realises. “This is something ... else.”

It’s not as though Mackenzie is free from unresolved trauma. The death of her grandmother left such a gloomy atmosphere that she left her childhood home in Alberta to escape it. Then her sister Sabrina died suddenly of an aneurysm. Mackenzie’s refusal to return home to attend the funeral has scarred her relationship with the rest of her family.

Even so, when she relates these mysterious occurrences to her mother and aunt, they urge her to come home at once, accepting without question that her dream experiences are real, as if they were nothing more out of the ordinary than falling into debt or having a bad break-up. One flight later, she’s welcomed back into the bosom of her family, though not without some wariness and suppressed anger on the part of her younger sister Tracey, Sabrina’s fraternal twin.

After this eventful beginning, Johns slows the pace right down, which is something of a mixed blessing. While the narrative certainly loses its forward momentum, she gives her characters space to breathe, reflect and develop, allowing Mackenzie to go on a scavenging hunt with her mother around old abandoned houses and attempt to mend bridges with Tracey over video games. She finds it tough, though, to admit to Tracey that she abandoned her family to their grief and has only returned because she wants something for herself.

Meanwhile, Johns is dialling up the ominous atmosphere, intensifying the sense of supernatural presences close at hand, the permeability of the barriers between worlds and the subjectivity of time. Since we first saw them in Mackenzie’s dreams, the woods surrounding the lake near her parents’ house have been enshrouded in a Lynchian air of foreboding. Now within touching distance of them, she realises that the forces invading her dreams have their origins in a dimlyremembered night she, her sisters and their cousin spent in those woods some years earlier.

In a supernatural thriller that is entirely female- and non-binary-dominated, Mackenzie’s objective, along with facing what awaits her amongst the trees, is to help herself and her mother, sister, aunts and cousin move on from the deaths of Sabrina and their grandmother and re-insert herself back into the family to make it whole again. Pointedly, Mackenzie’s father, briefly glimpsed at the kitchen table, only gets one or two lines before being despatched on a trip, not to be mentioned again.

For Bad Cree is a women’s space, in which there’s a tacit understanding that Mackenzie can only prevail by harnessing a strength shared, in one way or another, by all the women in her family. It’s about family bonds, healing, confronting the past and confronting oneself, all in the context of a supernatural horror that may progress in fits and starts but is lovingly layered, haunting and effectively executed.