Coyote Rage

Coyote Rage, a great title with a great cover, won the 2020 Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel. It's not a classic, and I think it inspired more smiles from me than shivers, but it's a lot of fun if it isn't taken too seriously. The author is Owl Goingback, also a great name.

Although it is definitely not for children, as the violence is graphic and ever-present, Coyote Rage is written in a YA style, making it easy to read in an afternoon. The events that occur are told so matter-of-factly that you may find yourself believing that there are animals that can change into humans.

Borrowing from Native American mythology, Goingback tells us that there is a Great Council, with all the animals having a representative. Coyote, the trickster, and an unpleasant character (the poor coyote always gets bad press) has decided he wants to end the rule of man on the planet. To do this, he must kill the human representative on the council, Luther Watie, an elderly Cherokee man who is in a nursing home.

Raven overhears Coyote's plan and wants to stop him. If Watie dies, his place would be taken by his estranged daughter, Sarah, who is a mortician in Florida who has no idea that she is really Blue Sky Woman. Goingback juggles the threads of these characters deftly.

The imagination of this novel is wonderful. Raven, Coyote, and a few other animals are shape-shifters, who can turn their skins inside out and take human form. Raven does this often, and the image of a raven-turned-man riding a Harley is irresistible. In a showdown in a cemetery (where else?) Sarah is attacked by a different shape-shifter: "What stood before her now was neither man nor rat, but a demented combination of the two. Towering over her in height, it was like something out of a Lon Chaney Jr. werewolf movie, only rodent-shaped. A wererat."

Now I laughed at this, not sneeringly but with full enjoyment of this Grand Guignol style. Other highlights have Luther, trying to escape Coyote, in a land called Galun'lati, which is another world populated by creatures such as a rolling head that wants to eat him and a little person who is cleaning his dead mother's bones, eating any remaining flesh.

Goingback even throws in some social commentary, as Luther wastes away in the nursing home: "Alcohol was forbidden at the Willows Nursing Home. Beer, wine and mixed drinks were considered bad things, far too harmful for the elderly residents, but an endless supply of pain pills, tranquilizers, and other prescribed medicine was quite okay and even encouraged."

My only complaint is that the ending was a bit abrupt, suggesting a sequel. I wanted a more definitive resolution.