The Night Wanderer

The novel primarily focuses on Pierre, an Anishinaabe vampire who exists in a liminal space between his own inherited Anishinaabe legends and the European mythology forced on his body. The novel extensively uses traditional vampire lore and simultaneously includes details about a variety of Anishinaabe legends, including the wendigo.

Notably, during the approximate period in which Pierre would have become a vampire (the 17th or 18th century), vampire sightings and beliefs caused multiple instances of mass hysteria throughout Europe. While creatures that fit the vampire motif exist in mythologies worldwide, Pierre’s vampiric nature most closely resembles the vampires of European folklore. Pierre’s vampiric traits, such as the inability to endure the sunlight, a monstrous hunger for blood, and supernatural strength, vary in terms of historicity. While drinking blood is a common vampiric motif throughout history and across cultures, many other vampiric traits described in the novel were invented during the boom of vampire literature during the Romantic period or later. For example, Pierre claims at one point to have porphyria, a condition that causes blistering with sunlight exposure. This claim alludes to a scholarly debate around the condition; while it was briefly put forward that porphyria could be a source of vampiric legends, this hypothesis has been largely discredited because the idea that vampires die in sunlight is a relatively modern invention. The version of vampirism used in the novel therefore draws more on Gothic literary traditions and vampire fiction than it does on traditional folklore.

The novel’s references to the figure of the wendigo attempt to build a parallel to the European vampire, even if the two are not particularly comparable. Traditionally, the wendigo is depicted as an evil spirit that possesses humans and drives them to insatiable greed and hunger, often resulting in cannibalism and murder. Many actual cases of cannibalism and murder among Indigenous groups have been attributed to wendigo possession. Much like the vampire, the figure of the wendigo has been used extensively in modern horror fiction; this has caused some controversy due to the taboo nature of the spirit. Some Indigenous people, however, also interpret the wendigo metaphorically. Just as the vampire can be used as a symbol for social power and greed, the wendigo has been interpreted as a metaphor for any sort of disconnection from society, whether on a colonialist level or an individual level. Thus, Pierre’s disconnection from his heritage—particularly through becoming a vampire—resonates strongly with this metaphorical interpretation.