White Horse by Erika T. Wurth

Until now, I'd never thought about the other world except as something on the silver screen or the page, though I had to admit, horror had always been my favorite, which had to say something. I didn't believe in an afterlife, had never let Aunt Sandy drag me to church, even when I was a little girl. Though Jesus she'd tried, hard. And though some of my best friends growing up were more tradish Natives, from NAC to old school Dine lifeways, I wasn't interested in their stuff either. Whenever we'd be walking off in the woods, trying to find a place to get high, and a coyote would cross our paths and they'd shudder, tell me we had to turn around, I'd tell them to go right ahead. I was going to move forward and get baked.

Kari James is an "urban Indian," an Apache living in Denver. She spends her days haunting bars, especially her beloved White Horse, but she in turn is haunted by twin tragedies: the car crash that has destroyed her father's brain, and the overdose death of her teenage friend Jaime. Another tragedy, the mysterious death of her mother, has had little conscious impact on her, because Kari barely remembers her. But when her friend Debby discovers a copper bracelet that her mother used to own, Kari finds herself literally haunted: by touching it, she seems to have unloosed her mother's ghost, who follows Kari with blood pouring out of her mouth. Her mother, it seems, wants her to solve the mystery of her death, which has something to do with both a vicious Apache monster named the Lofa and Kari's own never-before-met grandparents.

Native horror is having sort of a moment. It makes a lot of sense, as a genre, as it often emerges from an inversion of well-worn horror tropes. As Kari notes on a tour of Colorado's Stanley Hotel, which inspired Stephen King's The Shining, and provided the setting for the movie, "it's all Indian burial grounds." Horror has mined vague apprehensions about Native spirituality for hundreds of years, and Native writers like Stephen Graham Jones and Cherie Dimaline, and Wurth, have upended it by seizing the perspective for themselves.

But man, I just don't think this genre--written by Native authors or otherwise--is for me. I've read all three of those authors and not one has worked for me. I think one of the central problems is that modern horror novels tend to draw not from the long tradition of Gothic literature, but from movies. It's why Kari ends up in the Stanley Hotel in the first place, driven by her mother's spirit, and though she claims to be a King superfan, it's easy to tell that it's the movie that provides most of this section's touchstones. Like the Jones and Dimaline books, White Horse has no idea of how supernatural images, or even moments of intense fear, might be expressed stylistically: each time Kari's mom shows up, it's written in the same bland prose as the moment before it, where Kari is sitting at a bar drinking or shopping in a record store. Which is OK for a movie script, but you need someone who knows how to put on the fisheye lens or add in the special effects.

White Horse makes a few feints toward a larger story about Indigenous issues: Kari begins to suspect that her mother was targeted because she was active in the American Indian Movement, of which she knows little. When Kari touches the bracelet, or other items associated with her mother, she's transported into her mother's consciousness, watching Russell Means speak or attending a protest; a similar thing happens when she takes hold of an Apache "war club" and briefly occupies the mind of Geronimo. But the newfound information that gets dumped into Kari's mind in these moments sits awkwardly in the narrative, and Wurth is never really able to connect them to anything else. You could read White Horse and not really know anything about what Means was trying to accomplish, or who exactly Geronimo was fighting, and where or when. There is a general gesture toward a deeper engagement with the urban Indian community, as with the AIM center that Kari discovers her mom frequented, and suspicious types are always discouraging Kari from doing so. But these things are treated quite superficially: the life choice that is really meant to represent Kari's growth is the choice to buy and manage the bar herself.