{"id":12313,"date":"2026-02-23T09:51:49","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T17:51:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/?p=12313"},"modified":"2026-02-23T09:51:53","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T17:51:53","slug":"a-mythical-mystery-from-the-cold-north","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/23\/a-mythical-mystery-from-the-cold-north\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mythical Mystery From the Cold North"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Cold <\/em>is a brilliant example of Indigenous literary fiction. A powerful storyteller, award-winning playwright, columnist, filmmaker, and lecturer, Drew Hayden Taylor<\/u><\/a> 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\u2019s biggest city. Toronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“The profound lesson here is that even in the coldest, most desolate landscapes of our existence, it is these very connections that can keep our spirits warm and guide us through the storms.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s Rock<\/em> and Education is our Right.<\/em> Taylor was born nearby at Curve Lake First Nation. Over the last thirty years, he\u2019s won a host of awards while writing novels, plays, and documentaries, directing films, and touring the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is divided into three parts, with titles in Anishinaabemowin (and English). \u201cThe Storm Approaches\u201d 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\u2019s comic relief in Fabiola\u2019s thoughts: \u201cNo 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\u2019s first-year violin recital combined\u201d (13).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next, we\u2019re introduced to the handsome, aging, \u201cOjibwa hockey ninja\u201d Paul North as he awakens from a hangover. North\u2019s team is part of the Indigenous Hockey League, and he\u2019s 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<\/em>) and Cherie Dimaline (The Marrow Thieves<\/em>), Trent muses how Indigenous writers used to lament the past but now tend to explore future dystopian worlds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cThe Blizzard Rages\u201d these disparate characters connect. Trent talks racial politics with the brilliant journalist, Fabiola, who survived her cold ordeal and wrote a book she\u2019s now publicizing. When Trent and North discover they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taylor reveals in his acknowledgements that Cold <\/em>began its life as an Indigenous horror movie called Wendigo<\/em>, based on a mythical Anishinaabe nightmare creature, which evolved in the frozen north where people were starving. \u201cIt\u2019s a spirit. It doesn\u2019t have a body, but it has horrifying hunger, a hunger so strong it eclipses anything else\u2026 It needs a physical body so it can eat\u201d (305). Enough said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I highly recommend this novel. Though Cold<\/em> blends genres (murder mystery, horror, and thriller) it is something unto itself\u2014not 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books<\/a>, February 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image from The Georgia Straight<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,350,247],"tags":[670,669,668,425],"class_list":["post-12313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-indigenous-authors","category-murder-mystery","tag-canada","tag-cold","tag-drew-hayden-taylor","tag-indigenous-authors"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/parea5-3cB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12316,"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12313\/revisions\/12316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluehavenpress.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}