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“It wasn’t just a young, pretty, and smart woman driving away that night;��

��... she was a bookmark in the novel that was his life, showing him where he was currently and holding the place from where the story could or should be started again.��

It’s tough not to gush about the sheer brilliance of COLD! A straight-up horror novel by a Canadian aboriginal author that riffs on some not unexpected aboriginal themes �� university level indigenous studies programs; racism and xenophobia; hockey as a typical sport for aboriginal young men; isolation of northern aboriginal communities; and, of course, survival in that most contemptible of institutions, government and church run residential schools.

The horror? Well, what else? Serial murder and a man-eating wendigo, described in Wikipedia as “a supernatural being belonging to the spiritual traditions of Algonquian-speaking First Nations in North America. Wendigos are described as powerful monsters that have a desire to kill and eat their victims. In most legends, humans transform into wendigos because of their greed or weakness.��

And the title COLD? Well, aside from the generic widespread association of cold weather with Canada, “the wendigo was a personification of cold and hunger in a time when human survival relied on banding together and sharing resources, particularly during the long, harsh winters of the northern wilderness.��

And the nature of the wendigo curse? ”The curse transforms any person who eats human flesh of another human being in the Canadian wilderness into a massive, fur-covered humanoid beast with fangs and razor sharp claws.��

COLD is a murder mystery, a suspense thriller, a police procedural, a brilliant portrayal of a handful of compelling characters, a dollop of humour that never seems out of place or capable of disrupting the flow of an extremely high-speed narrative stemming from a plane crash in the Canadian sub-arctic AND some very, very skilled atmospheric writing. Kudos to a Canadian author who is definitely on my radar screen for future reading.

Paul Weiss