Something merciless, frigid, and cruel was descending upon Toronto. Many would say it was too late in the season for such an anomalous and severe weather manifestation to develop. Spring was technically just a few weeks away. Then there were those who were frequently ignored, but whose understanding of the world was far older, and they would say the icy climate was being called, beckoned even. In the age of science, who had ever heard of such silliness. Regardless, the cold came. And something, deep in the city, was delighted.
Cold is a twisty thriller, set in modern-day Toronto and overlaid with Indigenous mythology, and while it was consistently entertaining — and very often funny — I didn’t find this to be particularly deep or meaningful. Still, an engaging read that I took with me on a plane, despite knowing that it starts with a crash; I do enjoy Drew Hayden Taylor’s voice and I look forward to reading his work again in the future. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Cessna 206s are generally designed to fly higher than this particular plane was at the moment. A good, reliable utility aircraft, barely twenty years old, it was currently finding the principles of aerodynamics versus the laws of gravity somewhat problematic. It was in an argument of lift versus acceleration versus gravity versus ice on the wing, and to be blunt, the plane was losing.
A small plane crashes in the frozen muskeg of Northern Ontario, and after a brief and tense narrative focussed on the flight’s two survivors, the story jumps to a year later as one of those survivors is on a Canada-wide book tour with her rushed-to-print memoir of how she found her way to safety. Interwoven with her tale is that of Paul North — a defenceman in the Indigenous Hockey League who, at thirty-five, might be about to age out of semi-pro hockey — and Elmore Trent — a professor of Indigenous Studies who, despite having been born on a reserve and raised in a Residential School, treats his First Nations ancestry more as a subject for academic study than as culture to be lived. These strands, and characters, intersect in unpredictable ways, and the thriller is set up.
“Hmm, interesting. So, are you saying legends, in whatever their form, are restricted to time immemorial? There are no potential legends in the making today? The days of free-ranging legends or traditional stories regarding Indigenous people, places, and things are unfortunately a thing of the past? That’s a very dim view of contemporary life, Ms. Fiddler.”
As an unseasonable cold descends upon the city and a series of gruesome murders occur — which put both Elmore and Paul, unrelatedly, on the investigating detective’s radar — the professor is forced to wonder if the murderer is actually a legendary monster from his people’s mythology come to life. And if that is so, where can he find a modern day warrior to help him defeat it?
All of this was sounding crazier and crazier. But sometimes in life, the world became crazier and crazier through no action of your own . And coincidently, leaning in to the absurd was the only way you could fight back. In the frozen blizzard of the conundrum that had suddenly enveloped him, Elmore Trent could see a trail sketched hesitantly ahead of him. The question was: would he be walking it alone?
That’s as much plot as I’ll share, but I also want to note that Taylor discusses many other Indigenous authors’ works in this book. In the voice of his professor character, he positively recommends both Waubgeshig Rice’s novel Moon of the Crusted Snow and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (which I also enjoyed as dystopic explorations of the fears of Canada’s modern day First Nations peoples), and it makes sense that Elmore would recommend Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse to Paul (as it’s about hockey). Less enthusiastically, he refers to Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road as “well-written but contextually questionable” and Tomson Hiway’s play Dry Lips as “more a misogynistic play than a play about misogyny.” And it’s in the context of these other works that Taylor references that Cold felt lacking to me: it’s a decent mystery with thrilling elements, but I didn’t learn anything from it. Still: entertaining for what it is and I am happy to have read this.
