The Trickster. Muriel Gray
was warned by local non-native Canadians that trying to gain access to the Stoney Indian Tribe, whose First Nation reserve lies to the east of Banff by the small town of Cochrane, was all but impossible. Wary of outsiders, with a depressing range of serious social problems, these were not people who would be instantly eager to share tales of their ancestors with a stranger from Scotland.
But since the clan motto ‘Hold Fast Craigellachie’ was the telegram sent to the team leader nearing exhaustion during the railway construction’s most challenging section, it seemed right to follow suit.
To meet a reserve resident you make a date and a place, and then you go and wait. They don’t turn up. Well, they do. They watch you from afar. And if you keep coming back at the right time and the right place then eventually they come too.
It took nearly two weeks. Same place, same time, every single day. And then suddenly, one day I was in. My guide was a young woman, Co-Co Powderface, a champion barrel-rider and hunter. We talked and talked. We visited her home, a corrugated iron hand-built house, the tiny shack of her grandmother, a non-English speaker, and the surprise was that everything about it was resonant of lives I’d seen as a child in Scotland, when travelling in the Outer Hebrides and the far north Highlands. Strangely familiar territory.
Over the days we spent with Co-Co, her grandmother, through translation, told tales of shape shifting, of travelling hundreds of miles in minutes, of the spirits and their lives, and miserably, of darker things in their community, horribly real and human and indisputable.
So it’s to her, her family and her people I dedicate this new edition. Had I been able to travel there by clicking the internet, to browse through their myths and legends, idly gaze at photographs of First Nations reserves and forums about cultural practices and problems, I would never have had the privilege of meeting them.
Twenty years seems a long time ago. But just think. To something dark, something ancient, evil and indestructible, something that existed on earth long before the first fish crawled from the sea on its journey to evolve into mankind, it would seem no more than the sideways blink of an eye.
Muriel Gray, 2015
I’m very suspicious of people who read introductions.
In my experience the writer’s name in big, chunky letters is all I really need to pick up a book. If it’s a writer I don’t recognize, I’ll impulse buy on a title or a blurb or, if I’m being especially reckless, a beautifully painted cover. But if you’re still unsure whether or not to immerse yourself in the story ahead and need a further thousand words to completely convince you, then let me reassure even the most cautious buyer …
This is the best decision you’ve made lately and you’re in for an absolute treat.
Let’s go back in time ten years to when I first met Muriel Gray. No, scratch that. Turn the dial a further ninety degrees, crank up the handle and send your George Pal-era time machine back a full three decades and she’s starting her career as the coolest thing on the coolest show on television. She’s a presenter on the legendary music programme, The Tube, interviewing pretty much everyone you’ve ever heard of; fast-forward and she’s a kind of a famous TV producer and Britain’s most well-known mountain-climber and a member of the board at Glasgow School of Art (where she’s DOCTOR Muriel Gray) and an award-winning newspaper columnist and former rector of Edinburgh University. Oh, she’s also the patron of several Scottish charities, a respected art historian, an architecture buff, a professional illustrator, a marathon runner, a wife, a mother and a hugely successful business-woman too, in case you didn’t get the memo.
So when I first met Muriel ten years back and discovered she had a double life as a hugely successful horror novelist with three bestselling books to her name and deified by no less than Mister Stephen Edwin King of Portland, Maine, it really didn’t come as too much of a surprise.
The British are naturally suspicious of polymaths and we’re generally right. It’s hard enough to be wonderful at one thing and close to impossible to be brilliant at everything. Yet Muriel kind of is. Oh, and lest ye worry she’s jumping on some kind of genre gravy train when everyone is keen to flash their geek credentials let me assure you she’s very much the real deal. In an era where Hollywood pours money over precisely the kind of creative types they shunned and mocked for years, to the point where the word ‘Ferd’ has been created to identify ‘fake-nerds’, Muriel’s knowledge and love of all things horror is very close to unparalleled. This is a woman who knows her HP Lovecraft from her MR James and will liberally drop names like Machen, Matheson or Algernon Blackwood into even the most casual of dinner conversations. She’s as comfortable at a horror and fantasy convention in the rainy south-east of England as in a BBC studio in Television Centre, possibly even more so. You see, this is what she REALLY wanted to do while she was winning at all the amazing things she’s perhaps better known for and, trust me, it shows.
I remember sitting down to read The Trickster with that slight trepidation when you’re friends with the author. Two pages in and I was forty pages in. A hundred pages in and I was finished. How did that happen? It was so good I genuinely started Furnace the following day and finished off the week with the third of her excellent horror trio, The Ancient. Muriel is such a natural, her writing style so easy, that I can’t believe she hasn’t dipped her toe in these murky waters for precisely 1.5 decades. The Trickster was every weather-beaten paperback, every old comic book, every cult horror movie and every videotaped Hammer House of Horror she had ever stored away in the back of her brain and it literally exploded from her head into ours. She’d trained for it her entire life and she seemed to have a ball. I did too and, trust me, so will you as you read about Sam Hunt and his mysterious heritage and the thing beneath the mountains and all these terrible blackouts he’s been having at precisely the same time all these interesting corpses are showing up. Why in the name of Great Jehovah has this woman not written a horror novel in fifteen years? Why are you reading this introduction when there’s a monster of a book on the other side of the next page?
So if you only know Muriel from TV or radio or a familiar face up a Scottish mountain or that lady with the spiky blonde hair who sits across from you at the School of Art board meetings then you haven’t really, truly met the real her. This book in your hands is the closest thing to the Muriel her friends know and love and, to be honest, I’m slightly jealous you’re only just discovering what she’s really all about in this spanking new edition you’re holding right now.
She really is brilliant at everything, but the books, I would suggest, are her finest achievement and if you’re familiar with her in any way at all you’ll know that is a pretty damn fine recommendation.
Now stop reading the introduction. Turn the page and enjoy yourself.
Mark Millar
Glasgow, 2015
Alberta 1907 Siding Twenty-three
When he screamed, his lips slid so far up his teeth that the rarely exposed gum looked like shiny, flayed meat. Hunting Wolf’s eyes flicked open and stared. There was a semicircle of faces above him. Silent. Watching.
For a moment he stayed perfectly still, allowing himself to regain the feeling of being inside his body, that dull ache of reality after the lightness of the spirit’s escape. Then the numbing cold of the snow beneath his naked back stabbed at his skin, and mocked him with the knowledge that he was firmly back in the realm of the flesh.
Sweat was still trickling down his breast, beads of moisture clinging to his brown nipples like decoration, and he stared up at the grey, snow-laden sky in hot despair.
The