anthologies are always tricky, which is to say that they are rarely of consistent quality, or, rather, that rarely will every story in an anthology work for a given reader. this is obviously also true of single-author collections, but typically I find that if I like an author’s work I’ll get something out of every story in their collection even if not every story goes on the longlist of stuff I’d like to teach. anthologies, on the other hand, typically provide a few duds even when they’re overall very good.
Taaqtumi is a rarity for me, then, because, while there’s certainly some variability, I think pretty much every story in this book is a banger.
Taaqtumi collects nine stories by ten authors (the longest and, imo, best, “Lounge”, is co-written by Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley and Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley), most of them Indigenous: Inuit authors Aviaq Johnston, Thomas Anguti Johnston, Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley, and Gayle Kabloona; Tłı̨cho writer Richard Van Camp; and Mohawk writer Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley. absent indications to the contrary in their bios I take the other writers to be settlers, though several of their stories also feature Indigenous characters and elements. of these nine stories, the only one that fell flat for me is Ann R. Loverock’s “The Door”, and it’s not bad, by any means; it just didn’t particularly move me. broadly I would say the stories by Indigenous writers were stronger than the settler writers’ stories, but it was a difference of degree, not of kind.
the collection starts with a bang with Aviaq Johnston’s “Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: The Haunted Blizzard”, about a schoolchild returning home in a blizzard and finding herself pursued by something dangerous. you can tell that Johnston writes primarily for younger readers, something I absolutely don’t mean as a criticism — this is a really excellent horror story for children. it also sets up — in a very children’s book way (again, not a criticism!) — one of the
My mother doesn’t know. She’s too grown up to remember the scary parts of our land. The scary things that hide around us. She thinks that the land is nothing more than the science of the space around us, environment and nature. She thinks this is all that lives outside.
For some reason, elders and children know more than adults do, and i wonder why that is. They act like they know everything, as if everything has an explanation. At some point in their lives they forget the stories children are told, dismissing them as fairy tales and myths. They think that the scary women in the ice aren’t real, or that the little folk that you can only see at sunset are just imaginary, or that giants never roamed the earth. Just like all adults, my mother has forgotten all those things the elders had passed down.
the sense of the Arctic landscape as threatening runs throughout the collection, but without a moral component: the landscape and the climate are harsh, and in all the open space there are both natural and supernatural beings that, whether willfully (like the entities in Johnston’s blizzard) or simply by nature (like the polar bear in K.C. Carthew’s “Sila”) want to kill you. alongside this, however, is a sense of the Arctic as a space that tests humans. as a character in the Qistualik-Tinsleys’ “Lounge” puts it: “People go there to become more of what they are.” the Arctic here purifies and refines — but also, crucially, it can shelter: Richard Van Camp’s “Wheetago War II: Summoners” (which seems to be basically a test run for his subsequent graphic novels, which I now really want to read!) is about an Indigenous community protected — at least for a time — by its isolation; Gayle Kabloona’s “Utiqtuq” follows a young Inuk girl and her guardian who have been living off the land since the outbreak of a zombie pandemic in the south.
the highlight for me is the Qitsualik-Tinsleys’ “Lounge”, which fills almost a third of the anthology. it’s a fairly high-concept sci-fi story about an Inuk woman “returning” to the Arctic — where she has, in fact, never lived — to do research at an abandoned mining facility. both horror and sci-fi elements are really compelling, although horror readers may be disappointed by the hopeful (if not altogether upbeat) ending. it really blew me away — the entire anthology is definitely worth the price of admission for this story alone, in my opinion.
“Lounge” also exemplifies an element that runs through most of the stories, namely an engagement with the histories and contemporary realities of settler colonialism as it shaped Arctic and Northern communities in particular. Gayle Kabloona’s “Utiqtuq” is the standout for me here: Aliisa and her guardian Ittuq have been living off the land for years since they fled the outbreak of the zombie virus in Iqaluit, but their lives are upended when a Canadian government doctor shows up, promising to take them South to be vaccinated and (re)integrated into Canadian society — a promise Ittuq, a residential school survivor, rejects as all too familiar.
in a very different way, we can perhaps see this at work in Jay Bulckaert’s “The Wildest Game”, about a kind of wellness fascist who both believes humans need to be culled in order to combat “overpopulation” and also craves the taste of human flesh, which he expects will be both tastier and healthier than any other meat, and so moves to Yellowknife in order to begin hunting and eating humans. Repo Kempt’s “Strays” similarly takes aim at the narrative of the Arctic as a place of freedom or escape, as a veterinarian attempting to escape her life in the South on a circuit through remote communities finds her life catching up with her anyway. if the Arctic is a space of possibility, it is one that must be approached cautiously, and perhaps especially one that must be approached through relation to the Indigenous people who call it home and their knowledges of both its bounties and its dangers.
the anthology does not, however, romanticize: if “Lounge” is perhaps the most romantic story, it is preceded by Thomas Anguti Johnston’s “Revenge”, a sobering look at both the violences small communities can engender and the myopia of indiscriminate revenge. while this was one of the weaker individual stories overall (though the core concept is really good), it serves, I think, a necessary function in the anthology, and the whole is stronger for its presence.
all of this is to say: this book ruled and if you’re interested in horror you should definitely read it.
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