The Night Wanderer

“Somewhere, several thousand miles west, was a place he had once called home. It had birthed him. Nurtured him as a child and young man. But he had turned his back on it so long ago—angry at what the Fates had done to him. Ashamed at what he’d become.”

This passage immediately illuminates the internal struggle that Pierre experiences throughout the novel. Disconnection from one’s home is a major theme among all the characters, particularly when it is paired with a disastrous loss of agency. The language in this passage emphasizes the fact that Pierre did not choose to become a vampire; this transformation was “done to him,” and he never asked for the consequences and isolation that follow.

“The Welcome to the Otter Lake First Nations sign whizzed past them. Another fifteen minutes and she’d be home, nestled in her lower middle-class Aboriginal existence. Tiffany Hunter was band member 913, out of an estimated 1,100 or so.”

Citing Tiffany Hunter’s specific number in the band characterizes the subtle dehumanization that happens to her people on reserves; this also foreshadows the fact that she will come to think of herself as a nameless statistic. Tiffany’s disconnection from her own home starts with the system itself. Rather than being a person who lives there, she is a number from the very beginning. Additionally, by emphasizing that she is lower middle-class, this passage illuminates the financial disparity between her and Tony.

“Native mythology was full of dangerous and mysterious creatures—wendigos who were cannibal spirits that ate anything and everyone, spirits that took over a body and made people do crazy things, demon women with very sharp elbows and teeth in parts of the female body that weren’t supposed to have teeth. Tiffany occasionally thought of them when she and her friends played video games.”

This passage introduces the imagery from Indigenous mythology that lingers throughout the novel and introduces the sense of disconnection that Tiffany feels about her own heritage. Significantly, the video games are more real to her than her own culture is. At the same time, however, the creatures from Indigenous mythologies never make a real appearance in the novel, while vampires, a European invention, do; this pattern implies that colonization has even managed to have an effect on the supernatural.