I read Robert C. Wilson’s Crooked Tree before I began this blog, I guess. I remembered it being better than it seemed this time around, but it works as a horror novel. In fact, the first third or so was quite unnerving, although I’d read it before. After that the plot tends to require greater suspension of belief. But then again, American Indian horror has come a long way since then. Wilson, according to the limited information about him online, isn’t an Indian. These days publishers are very concerned with appropriation—something that wasn’t an issue back in 1980. And these days the work of Stephen Graham Jones, who is both a Blackfoot and an excellent horror writer, raises the bar considerably. But Wilson is honest about the situation in his laying out of the novel.
Axel Michelson is a lawyer and he’s working to preserve the fictional Crooked Tree State Forest and prevent development. Many of his colleagues and neighbors in Michigan are Indians, and so is his wife. Axel’s efforts are hampered by a sudden onslaught of black bear attacks. The description of the first three or four are scary enough to dissuade you from ever going camping again. Axel’s assistant is an Ottawa and and he and his family suspect a bearwalk is involved. This is the reason I read the novel the first time. As a Native American folkloric monster, the bearwalk is difficult to uncover. There are a couple more novels—one of them hard to find—that feature the tales, and there’s a university press book on folklore that has some accounts. Not much more is out there that I can locate.
A bearwalk is a kind of shape-shifter. A spirit that can control bears, in this case. Axel becomes the white savior who uncovers the ancient ritual to stop the bearwalk, which has taken control of his wife—his main motivation for stopping it—while the Indians can’t figure out what to do about it. They do tell him about the ritual, but mourning the loss of their culture, they fear it’s gone forever. Meanwhile the bear attacks continue but once the shock of the first few attacks has worn off, they don’t scare so much. There’s also a lot of supernatural involved, mostly drawn from native traditions. It seems clear that, like Axel, Wilson did quite a bit of research on American Indian folklore. He treats the Ottawa culture with respect and wrote a novel that might’ve had more influence than it seems. It’s well worth the read the first time around.
