Cold by Drew Hayden Taylor

Reviewed by Wendy Hawkin

Cold is a brilliant example of Indigenous literary fiction. A powerful storyteller, award-winning playwright, columnist, filmmaker, and lecturer, Drew Hayden Taylor infuses this mythical mystery with nuggets of knowledge, literary allusions, and humour (black and otherwise). He began his career as a standup comic. A handful of diverse characters, unknown to each other, combine to track and kill an unbelievable enemy that touches all their lives in Canada’s biggest city. Toronto.

I met Taylor in the early 1990s at Trent University in Peterborough when he was publicizing his two one act plays for youth: Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock and Education is our Right. Taylor was born nearby at Curve Lake First Nation. Over the last thirty years, he’s won a host of awards while writing novels, plays, and documentaries, directing films, and touring the world.

The book is divided into three parts, with titles in Anishinaabemowin (and English). “The Storm Approaches” begins with the crash of a Cessna 2065 in Northern Ontario. A young Indigenous boy dies. A driven Caribbean journalist, Fabiola Halan, suffers a compound fracture in her right leg, and the pilot, an Anishinaabe woman named Merle Thompson, leaves Fabiola alone, intent on traversing thirty kilometres of ice and snow to find help. Here, in this tragic moment we catch a glimpse of Taylor’s comic relief in Fabiola’s thoughts: “No matter the amount of pain, people whose tortured command of the English language would and usually did cause her more discomfort than a mishandled Brazilian wax and a children’s first-year violin recital combined” (13).

Next, we’re introduced to the handsome, aging, “Ojibwa hockey ninja” Paul North as he awakens from a hangover. North’s team is part of the Indigenous Hockey League, and he’s in Toronto for a tournament, perhaps his last. The inclusion of Elmore Trent, Professor of Indigenous Literature, provides Taylor with a spokesperson for Canadian Indigenous fiction. With nods to dystopian writers, Waubgeshig Rice (Moon of the Turning Leaves) and Cherie Dimaline (The Marrow Thieves), Trent muses how Indigenous writers used to lament the past but now tend to explore future dystopian worlds.

Meanwhile, Detective Ruby Birch is investigating a trail of vicious murders by a serial killer leapfrogging across the country. The question that drives the plot and plagues the reader is who, or what, is this killer? As “The Blizzard Rages” these disparate characters connect. Trent talks racial politics with the brilliant journalist, Fabiola, who survived her cold ordeal and wrote a book she’s now publicizing. When Trent and North discover they’re both connected to one of the victims, they decide to work together. After all, this killer is hunting people they know. They could be next. The twists will tie you in knots.

Taylor reveals in his acknowledgements that Cold began its life as an Indigenous horror movie called Wendigo, based on a mythical Anishinaabe nightmare creature, which evolved in the frozen north where people were starving. “It’s a spirit. It doesn’t have a body, but it has horrifying hunger, a hunger so strong it eclipses anything else… It needs a physical body so it can eat” (305). Enough said.

I highly recommend this novel. Though Cold blends genres (murder mystery, horror, and thriller) it is something unto itself—not unlike the Wendigo. Fascinating and spellbinding, it will keep you reading far into the night. Who or what is the Wendigo? And how will they stop it?

Cold is published by McClelland & Stewart.