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language: English
country: Canada
year: 2016
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, horror
dates read: 23.5.21-29.5.21, 24.3.23-17.4.23
Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler’s Wrist is as exhilarating on rereading as it was the first time. it interweaves two (main) stories: the childhood to early adulthood of Church, an Anishinaabe teenager living in northern Ontario, descended from a wiindigoo, son of a Holocaust survivor, as he navigates a life on the boundary between human and monster and comes face to face with the both literal and figurative monsters of capitalist resource extraction; and the diary of Harker Lockwood, an aspiring psychologist who travels north to study “Windigo Psychosis” in 1872 and finds himself caught up in a mix of human and supernatural events as he observes the palaeontological dig sites of Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
truly my only complaint about the entire book is the editing — and in this case I really exclusively mean the copyediting. the writing is fundamentally solid, the plotting and characterization is excellent, but there are lots of small punctuation errors, typos, and occasionally awkward syntax — but in the way where it would just take, like, a punctuation tweak or cutting two words to fix it. it’s frustrating because this book is so good, but the copyediting problems make it feel unprofessional. it’s at the top of the list of books I’d like to force a big 5 publisher to reedit and republish with the marketing it deserves. (also get a language consultant for the Anishinaabemowin, which is messy.)
it’s a relentlessly dark, cold book — if I were going to assign it to a season, it would be winter, unquestionably, although the climax is set at the beginning of a northern autumn. it’s about violence: the cannibalistic hunger of the wiindigoo, sexual violence, the horrors of the Holocaust and of residential schools, the ways trauma and abuse reproduce themselves within communities, the violence of settler colonialism and capitalist resource extraction (figured in this case through literal corporate vampires). it’s about the fine line between the human and the monstrous. it’s about the fragile, dangerous possibility of human connection. it’s about the entanglement of human, monster, and environment.
if you like horror or dark fantasy, do yourself a favor and acquire a copy.
moods: dark, grimy, mysterious, tense