With an Authentic Voice and Monster Mayhem to Match, Trail of Lightning Breaks New Ground in Fantasy
Trail of Lightning, the debut novel by Rebecca Roanhorse (who last month won the Nebula Award for her short story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”), opens with a situation that feels familiar within the bounds of urban fantasy: Maggie Hoskie has been in semi-retirement after a job went bad and she lost her partner, but the residents of a small town called Lukachukai needs her specific skill set in order to find a missing child, and they try to lure her back.
Trail of Lightning
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Trail of Lightning
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After a tense interview with the town leaders and the girl’s family, Maggie heads to the wilderness kill the monster and rescue the child. Her confrontation with the beast goes badly. Even with her supernatural abilities—she calls them “clan powers;” their strength comes from her ties to her family—she is hard pressed to defeat this creature, unlike any she has faced before. Maggie is a monster hunter of the Diné (the traditional name for the Navajo tribe). The partner who left her is Niezghání, an immortal Navajo warrior who non-Indigenous readers might liken to Hercules.
After a tense interview with the town leaders and the girl’s family, Maggie heads to the wilderness kill the monster and rescue the child. Her confrontation with the beast goes badly. Even with her supernatural abilities—she calls them “clan powers;” their strength comes from her ties to her family—she is hard pressed to defeat this creature, unlike any she has faced before. Maggie is a monster hunter of the Diné (the traditional name for the Navajo tribe). The partner who left her is Niezghání, an immortal Navajo warrior who non-Indigenous readers might liken to Hercules.
On the surface, these plot elements aren’t too unusual to find in a contemporary fantasy novel—gods and magic and monsters rubbing elbows with the everyday. There are dozens of modern takes on various mythologies, legends, and tales from folklore published every year—including other forays into Native American mythic systems. That this book also features a largely Diné cast of characters, however, is completely unheard of. Native American characters in urban fantasy tend to be isolated or ornamental, either offensive caricatures or lonely beings, cut off from their cultures or made to represent them in total.
The simple fact that Roanhorse is of Indigenous descent herself does not make this a remarkable novel (though it is, for that, urban fantasy being a genre happy to trade in the trappings of Native culture, but not always in a way welcoming to actual Natives), but her lived cultural experience gives it a knowingness and authenticity that imbues every page. The magical system in Trail of Lightning isn’t some culturally stripped mythology, but grounded in modern Diné culture and mores: the people of the town grill Maggie about her clan ties (questions she sidesteps with something less than aplomb). Characters are as likely to live in a hogan as a trailer.
The cultural milieu is not the only notable thing about the novel. Maggie decides to take the slain monster’s head to a medicine man she knows in Tse Bonito in order to get his opinion on the strange, singular creature. In her preparations—filling the truck with hooch, which is what it runs on, gasoline being a scarce commodity; caring for the rez mutts who are her companions and early warning system; taking an almost decadent shower, given the water levels in the tanks—Maggie fills us in on the state of the world. It’s been a decade or so since Big Water, when a cataclysm of earthquakes, hurricanes, and rising tides drowned the world, resetting coastlines as far inland as Denver. The world of Trail of Lightning is post-apocalyptic, set in a place and among people who know something from apocalypse: Indigenous people are far too familiar with worlds ending.
Things were bad enough before roughly a third of the Earth drowned—Water Wars through the West and Southwest; resource grabs by multinationals and the US government—so bad the Navajo Nation built a wall around the reservation, 50 feet high and clearly abetted by a supernatural force. (The irony of a wall built by aboriginal people to keep the US government out is not lost.) Not long after the wall went up, the waters rose. What was once the Navajo reservation is now Dinétah, a largely functioning enclave in an unstable world. With the death of the Fifth World, our world, the old powers returned: magic like Maggie’s clan powers, the warrior Niezghání, and the trickster Coyote. Niezghání found Maggie right after Big Water and the ruin it wrecked on her family, and apprenticed her in monster hunting in this new Sixth World. And then he left her. She doesn’t want to talk about it, in this world or the next.
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In her foray into Tse Bonito, Maggie encounters friends and enemies both. She has a tense standoff with Longarm, a puffed up lawman, and an exasperating, comforting visit with Tah, a man she considers grandfather. Tah is a medicine man, and though they aren’t blood kin, their relationship is familial. And exactly like family, Tah is annoying and presumptuous with Maggie, who just wants to get information out of him and get out of town. (Or so she says… Maggie isn’t altogether trustworthy as a narrator, as she’s not precisely honest with herself.) Tah saddles her with his actual grandson, Kai Aviso, who’s from what used to be Albuquerque. Kai claims to know what the monster is: a form of golem not dissimilar from the creatures of Jewish lore, created by someone powerful, for fell purpose. Together, they strike out into Dinétah to answer the riddle of these new monsters.
In her foray into Tse Bonito, Maggie encounters friends and enemies both. She has a tense standoff with Longarm, a puffed up lawman, and an exasperating, comforting visit with Tah, a man she considers grandfather. Tah is a medicine man, and though they aren’t blood kin, their relationship is familial. And exactly like family, Tah is annoying and presumptuous with Maggie, who just wants to get information out of him and get out of town. (Or so she says… Maggie isn’t altogether trustworthy as a narrator, as she’s not precisely honest with herself.) Tah saddles her with his actual grandson, Kai Aviso, who’s from what used to be Albuquerque. Kai claims to know what the monster is: a form of golem not dissimilar from the creatures of Jewish lore, created by someone powerful, for fell purpose. Together, they strike out into Dinétah to answer the riddle of these new monsters.
Kai is a a winking. flirting rogue with the luck of the devil, and his silver tongue. His interactions with the prickly, standoffish Maggie veer from almost friendly to frustrated and angry. Who is he to question her? Maggie hasn’t had a partner since Niezghání—whom she is not going to talk about—so it’s itchy and uncomfortable when she has to take someone else into account. Kai is clearly hiding clan powers of his own; his ability to talk people into doing what he wants seems incommensurate with his good looks and charm, though he has both in spades. Maggie never hassles him much about this. She’s got her own secrets.
Maggie and Kai traverse Dinétah in her rusting truck, moving deeper into the mystery that is the golem and its creator. Their travels also inevitably intersect with places redolent with the shame of Maggie’s recent past, places that conjure unwelcome memories. The novel’s pacing is breakneck, as Kai and Maggie move from one thrilling sequence to another, not always one step ahead of the violence and danger that threatens Dinétah. Maggie is a fascinating character: not someone you want to know, exactly, but someone you’d love to have at your back in a fight.
Trail of Lightning is an audacious take on the conventions of both urban fantasy and the post-apocalyptic novel, binding them two together in a way that could only and ever happen in Dinétah, in the Sixth World.
Trail of Lightning is available June 26.