Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline

And then the creature dipped its head, tucking its narrow snout into its chest. In a moment its legs unfolded, covered in dark fur and bent like a dog's, but much too long. It stood up on its rear paws, which were the size of an adult's splayed hand, revealing a torso that was sleek and wrapped in fur but without the barrel of protruding canine ribs. This chest was flatter and wider, muscled like a man's. The face was dominated by glint and wet--bright yellow eyes rimmed with a pink third lid, and a mouth rammed with splintery teeth, too many to comprehend.

Joan's husband Victor has been gone for over a year, but she hasn't given up searching. Her family suspects he has left her, but her grandmother and her friend, a foul-mouthed elder named Ajean, know there are dangers in the northern Ontario woods where their Metis community is located. Joan grew up hearing stories of the rogarou, the fearsome werewolf-like creature that possesses a man, wearing his skin like a suit, making him forget he was a man. When Joan discovers Victor has become a traveling preacher under the name Eugene Wolff (get it), she realizes that he has been possessed by the malevolent rogarou--but is it Victor who is the rogarou, or the sinister German man bankrolling the Reverend Wolff's tent revival?

The rogarou, in Cherie Dimaline's Empire of the Wild, is a representation of all the malicious forces that drive the Metis, the descendants of Cree and French voyageurs, off of their traditional homes. Just before his disappearance, Joan and Victor argued about his desire to sell a tract of valuable lakefront property to white developers--a lucrative deal, to be sure, but one that would leave the Metis pushed back once again into the depths of the woods. When Joan confronts Heiser, the sinister German, he confesses that the tent revival is the perfect thing to distract "Indians" from the pipeline being built in their backyard, pipelines which will make him even richer.

There's an interesting distinction the novel make between revival-style evangelical Christianity, which is a lie and a distraction, and the traditional Catholicism of Joan's Metis family, which, like the traditional beliefs that help ward off the rogarou, are potent and communitarian. Heiser, for his part, turns out to be a Wolffsegner, which--I'm only guessing here--is a figure of Germanic legend who control wolves, including rogarous. It's Victor who is the rogarou, the betrayer figure who is taken in, like possession, by the insane idea to give away the land. Heiser is the white European all to ready to make use of those who would betray the Metis community from the inside.

I suspected as much going into it, but despite the interesting First Nations cultural gloss, Empire of Wild struck me as a standard pulp thriller, the kind of book with obscene grandmas and plucky teen sidekicks, and where people say things like, "I knew it was you, you son of a bitch!" There's something all-too cinematic about it, as if the book itself exists to be turned into a film or a television show, where the horror and suspense can be buoyed by special effect and swelling strings. As a book, though, it wasn't for me.