Bonechiller, by Graham McNamee
McNamee, Graham (2008). Bonechiller. NY: Wendy Lamb books. 304 pages.
Graham McNamee, author of the 2003 thriller Acceleration and the 1999 Delacorte winner Hate You, is one of those YA authors you tend to forget about because they publish so comparatively infrequently but who, when one of their books does finally make it to the shelf, you’re both satisfied and thinking, “Dude! About damn time!”
Following in the thriller mode he began in Acceleration and adding a touch of the supernatural, McNamee sets his latest novel in the depths of winter and in the sparsely populated Canadian north. After a night with his friends– Pike–militaristic and mercuric–Howie–Pike’s brainy younger brother–and Ash–a girl boxer with Native blood–Danny, newly arrived to the town of Harvest Cove, is chased and marked by an unidentifiable large beast. Wary of sharing this experience with the gang (especially since he is nursing a crush on Ash), Danny keeps mum about it until Howie reports a similar encounter. As Danny and Howie begin to notice physiological changes that appear to be the result of their meeting with the beast, the four friends investigate what appears to be an historical phenomenon and embodiment of a First Nations legend.
While I enjoyed this fast-moving thriller–especially the chill that seems to pervade the narrative–I am both intrigued by and concerned about the First Nations legend mined by McNamee. Drawing from the story of the Windigo, an evil and angry creature that hungers for human flesh, McNamee relies on the story’s only full-native character–Ash’s father–to relate the myth. While this seems to preserve the story’s “voice” as it attaches a native character to the story and depicts this character’s ownership and telling of the myth, I can’t help but feel like the old “First Nations Legend” trope is a little tired. It’s kind of like the old “Ancient Indian Burial Ground” that serves as the explanation for the disturbances in Poltergeist. While, on one hand, I appreciate an attempt to authorize the mythologies of and give voice to a people who have been historically marginalized, I wonder if this focus on the more horrific of the tribal legends isn’t somewhat manipulative and doesn’t ultimately paint a sensationalist picture of the people who identify as native.