The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel.

Stephanie McKenzie is a visiting assistant professor of English at Sir
Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is
the editor and co-publisher of However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of
Poetry and Song from Newfoundland & Labrado

Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer is excellent. I got caught up in the suspense of a young teenager, Tiffany Hunter, trying to get meaning out of life. Her mother has left home to live with her new boyfriend—or, as Tiffany’s father puts it, she “ran off with that white guy.” Not long ago, she lived with Tiffany, Granny Ruth, and Keith, Tiffany’s father. Tiffany cannot get help or interest from school, and one of the problems is the Eurocentric nature of education and racism. Granny Ruth, who still speaks in Anishinabe and is “one of the last fluent speakers of the language on the reserve,” provides a contrast, but Tiffany will not learn from those she should until she experiences a rite of passage at the novel’s end. She is also treated poorly, and dumped, by her “white” boyfriend, who often uses her status card to buy things tax-free. Taylor challenges cultural stereotypes and, most significantly, has us quickly turning pages to find out how a mystery will unfold.

A strange man, Pierre L’Errant, has shown up from Europe (to live in the basement of Tiffany’s home) and cannot stand or live in daylight; he seems hundreds of years old but claims he is in his early 20s. We are told that “[t]he last time the man from Europe had stood on this land it had not been called Canada. Nor had this part of it been called Ontario, or even Toronto”; moreover, he looks Anishinabe and claims to be “of Native ancestry.” He is a Native vampire, as we find out, though he seems, too, like a Wendigo or fierce owl warned about in Anishinabe traditional stories. “He [walks] tall and proud, yet his movements [are] slow, soft and deliberate—like those of an animal hunting its prey,” and “[a] long time ago, in the before time, [this] stranger had gone by the name of Owl.”

Perhaps the one bit of criticism I can levy here is that Pierre L’Errant is not scary enough. The reader immediately feels compassion for him and likes him, and though we later find out he likes and has lived on human blood, we can’t be that scared (the narrative has put us on his side). While I could not put the book down, I also could not stop thinking about the subtitle of the book: “A Native Gothic Tale.” To share a space in a contemporary Native Gothic genre, or simply the Gothic, would be to compete these days with Haisla writer Eden Robinson. Indeed, there are worlds of difference between the Anishinabe and Haisla, but Robinson is the best Gothic writer Canada has. She is Canada’s Flannery O’Connor. And I am scared by her worlds and characters. However, I was not that scared by Taylor’s book.

The Night Wanderer, though, is well worth the read, and I would recommend it to anyone.