Why you shouldn’t sleep on Jessica Johns’ Bad Cree: A chilling debut about family, grief, and survival

What begins with a severed crow’s head and a haunting dream evolves into something far more layered in Bad Cree, Jessica Johns’ eerie and powerful debut. This genre-blending novel offers readers a gripping supernatural mystery while also digging deep into themes of grief, intergenerational trauma, and the quiet, often unseen strength of women supporting one another through pain.

When Mackenzie wakes to find a crow’s head in her hands—only to have it vanish—she can no longer ignore the disturbing dreams that have been plaguing her. As her waking world becomes increasingly infected by her nightmares, she leaves Vancouver for her hometown in Alberta to reconnect with the family she left behind. At first, she fears the worst: her mother and sister are furious with her for skipping her sister Sabrina’s funeral. The stage is set for major emotional fallout—but instead of fracturing further, the women in Mackenzie’s family do something more surprising: they show up for each other.

This is one of the things I loved most about Bad Cree. While tension and hurt simmer beneath the surface, the family dynamic is not one of melodramatic implosion. Instead, it’s a deeply honest portrayal of women navigating grief and guilt while still finding ways to offer love, protection, and ultimately, trust. Yes, mistakes were made, but these women don’t let those mistakes define them. They carry on, and more importantly, they carry each other.

One of the central themes in Bad Cree is the danger of facing things alone—especially when you have a strong, supportive network. Everyone in Mackenzie’s family is carrying the same secret, and yet no one is talking. The silence isn’t born of distrust but of misguided love and protection. Mothers want to shield their daughters. Daughters want to avoid being a burden. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that withholding the truth only fuels the danger. Healing begins when they finally come together, when the generations learn to trust each other not just with secrets, but with the hard work of facing down trauma—together.

It’s a narrative choice that resonates particularly strongly for women, who are so often socialized to internalize blame and avoid imposing on others. Mackenzie believes she brought the danger home and must therefore be the one to solve it. This self-sacrificing instinct is all too familiar: a need to redeem oneself by quietly enduring, rather than asking for help. But Bad Cree challenges that narrative by illustrating the power—and necessity—of collective strength. Family, after all, is meant to help shoulder the burden, not watch from the sidelines.

The horror elements in the novel are genuinely unsettling—there are images and sequences here that wouldn’t be out of place in a nightmare-inducing film. But the horror isn’t gratuitous. The figure of the wheetigo, a malevolent being from Cree mythology, is more than just a monster. It functions as both literal and symbolic threat, representing the insidious, lasting impact of exploitation, greed, and destruction—especially when visited upon Indigenous lands. The novel draws a powerful link between the personal hauntings of grief and guilt, and the collective trauma inflicted by resource extraction industries. While Mackenzie’s community isn’t currently under siege by oil companies, the damage has already been done—and left behind.

That theme—what happens after the plunder—is one I’ve seen echoed in other recent reads, such as Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie Renden. But where Renden’s novel portrays a community mid-pillage, Johns explores what survival looks like once the outsiders have moved on, having taken everything they could. In Bad Cree, the horror is not only what was done, but how little those who did it ever bothered to look back.

Ultimately, Bad Cree is a mystery, a horror story, and a family drama all in one. But above all, it is a novel about survival—not just surviving trauma but surviving each other’s pain and finding your way back to love and trust in the aftermath. Jessica Johns has written a haunting and thought-provoking debut that lingers long after the final page.

Related Content

• Jessica Johns on being Cree, Queer, and representation (Dark Matter Zine)
• 5 questions with Jessica Johns (Bad Cree) (Scribe)
• Book Review: Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon (Write on the World)
• Book review: Indigenous horror novel Bad Cree is a chilling tale of grief (The Straits Times)
• Guardians of the Earth: Indigenous resistance success stories (Istituto Analisi Relazioni Internazionali)

Now available in print and on Kindle!

Now that Jack has been forced to reflect on everything he has to lose, he resolves to do better. He’s determined to spend more time at home with his family and repair the relationships that have suffered over the years while he’s been so focused on work. But as Callie’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, Jack realizes he has a lot more room to improve than he realized – and it might be too late to save his daughter after all.

For fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Push, and Baby Teeth.