While I haven't read Nick Medina's 'Sisters of the Lost Nation' yet, I have read and enjoyed 'Indian Burial Ground', which was also set on the Louisiana reservation of the fictional Takoda tribe. This third story follows suit, trawling in characters I remember (and some I don't) from its predecessor. As I understand it, they're all standalone stories that happen to be set in the same place, if maybe not the same time. The name of the tribe was immediately familiar and so was Noemi's name, as I haven't heard it in many other places. She was a major character in 'Indian Burial Ground' but just a peripheral one here.

The primary character is Henry Hotard, who used to play guitar in a band on the stage of the Blue Gator Grill, which is owned and run by his grandparents, Pawpaw Mac and Mawmaw Tilly. That was before COVID though and times have changed. Now he makes ghosthunting videos on YouTube, as the leader of a small group called the Spirit Seekers, along with his girlfriend Jade, who works the bar at the Blue Gator, and his best friend Todd, who was the bassist in his band. Well, that was the reality of a couple of years ago but things have changed again. Like 'Indian Burial Ground', this is told in two alternating timeframes but they're much closer together: 2023 and 2025.

If you don't think two years is a particularly long time, then let me explain that it's a vast gulf for Henry. In 2023, his future was bright. In 2025, he's a paraplegic with zero feeling below his armpits. Then again, he's still alive. Roddy Bishop isn't, but then we knew that from 'Indian Burial Ground', because he's the prologue. That book began in the aftermath of him throwing himself in front of a Jeep and one pivotal thread of story followed his disbelieving girlfriend Noemi struggling to come to terms with the fact that he committed suicide.

Here, we meet him alive, initially celebrating an anniversary with her at the Blue Gator and then covering Henry's ghosthunting for News 11. He's a reporter and, while he doesn't remain alive for long, it takes almost the whole of 'The Whistler' for us to learn how he really died. Medina keeps us carefully on the hook there, just as he keeps us on the hook about what happens to Henry, that story not even hinted at in 'Indian Burial Ground', as far as I can recall. Clearly they're connected in some fashion but we don't learn how until most of the way through this book.

'The Whistler' is told from Henry's perspective, alternating between the two timeframes. In 2023, he's desperate enough to establish himself as a success on YouTube that he's rather annoying. He has talent, caring grandparents (though his father is entirely absent and his mother rarely shows up and makes everything about her when she does), a loving girlfriend and a loyal best friend. We may want him to succeed but we don't really like him much as he goes about it. He's not as bad as his mother but he is selfish and it's not hard to argue that he doesn't deserve the people he has.

In 2025, he's a mess, as you might imagine. I don't just mean physically, though his body is broken beyond repair. I mean mentally. He doesn't feel that he has anything to live for, something that's only tripled when he meets Rhett Collie at the Spinal Cord Injury Peer and Family Support Center. Rhett is also a paraplegic but has been for a lot longer and his body has atrophied over time. He's the future to Henry, a reminder that as bad as he feels he has it, it's about to get a lot worse. His final words in that meeting are to tell Rhett that he doesn't want to be like him.

Eventually, the 2023 timeframe reaches the point where Henry is crippled and the 2025 timeframe reveals some truths that weren't evident two years earlier. Between them, they tell a completed story, providing as they do so a new beginning as much an ending, and they surprised me greatly. I guess the clues were always there, in brief interludes spent in Native American mythology, but I'd failed to grasp why Medina felt the need to include them. Looking back, I was likely too caught up in things that didn't matter as much to notice the things that did. That's on me.

Just like 'Indian Burial Ground', this is marketed as a Native American horror novel but, just like 'Indian Burial Ground', it's general fiction as much as it's horror. Both books have horror elements riddled through them—hauntings, superstitions and violent deaths—but they also speak to social concerns far more than they exploit them for horrific gain.

Sure, this is a book about a team of ghosthunters who want to find out what happened to Jackie Cadow half a century earlier in 1974. She  got back from seeing Aerosmith in California in time to find her parents pulped and quickly follow suit. Someone or something was whistling outside and, as the title of a recent Native American horror anthology suggested, 'Never Whistle at Night'. It attracts bad spirits and allows evil to attach itself to you. We're clearly led to believe that there's some sort of monster out there, dubbed 'The Whistler', who murdered the Cadows and may well still be around when Henry's team starts poking around.

However, it's just as fundamentally a book about loss. Noemi loses her boyfriend, when he throws himself in front of a Jeep. Henry loses the use of most of his body, for reasons we have to wait to learn. Henry also loses a family member, just to natural causes, but it's no less traumatic for that. In different ways, Jade and Todd lose their best friend, even though he's alive. He can't do a lot of what he used to do because of his paraplegia but, even more importantly, he's lost the will to do it because he doesn't think he can, that it even matters any more.

This also means that, while the hauntings that the Spirit Seekers investigate are traditional ones, using all the traditional equipment, the most important haunting in the book isn't a creepy house but Henry himself. He's haunted by his past, by his actions and decisions, ones that we learn about in time as the story progresses and ones that are revealed to us separately. The point of the book isn't to solve a traditional haunting, like the gruesome murder of Jackie Cadow, but to find a way to come to terms with what Henry has done so that he can move forward.

As such, this is perhaps less of a Native American novel than just a novel, because what Henry has to go through could apply to anyone of any race. However, Medina hangs this on Native American superstition and mythology and finds serious meaning in the process. Almost everything that I'd noted down as a potential negative while reading was resolved satisfactorily by the end, courtesy of that superstition and mythology, along with entirely grounded human motivations. I'd call this a better book than 'Indian Burial Ground' because it does a lot of the same things but without any of its drawbacks, my confusion between characters in that previous book over wider timeframes being the chief one. That's not a problem here.

While I wait for a fourth novel set amongst the Takoda people and keep my eyes open for a copy of the first, I see that Nick Medina has a story in 'Never Whistle at Night'. It doesn't seem to be tied to this novel, as easy as it would have been to, say, just lift a chapter from this book for that one, so I'm intrigued to see what else he came up with around this particular theme. That's on my TBR shelves, so I should probably prioritise it once I've wrapped up a barrage of recent submissions. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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