Aviaq Johnston

The Haunted Blizzard, the powerful new graphic novel by prize-winning Inuk author Aviaq Johnston and illustrated by Ontario artist Athena Gubbe, begins with school being cancelled. A blizzard has descended on Iqaluit and the younger children are warned to wait for their older siblings from the high school to accompany them home. Inu and her friends, who are slightly older, however, are thrilled to be allowed to walk home on their own. “We’re in Grade 7, we don’t have to get picked up anymore,” one says, as they put on their winter coats. Once they separate, though, and Inu continues on her own, the situation becomes less jubilant. She resists an Elder’s invitation to stay with her friend Nita, despite the warning, “the storm is full of bad things.” The reader becomes aware of the truth of this statement long before Inu, as a spectral figure follows her through the storm, into the darkness of her home.

Johnston, whose short story “Tarnikuluk” won the Aboriginal Arts and Stories competition and a Governor General’s History Award in 2014, and whose debut novel Those Who Run in the Sky was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Young People’s Literature, is a forceful and convincing writer. The Haunted Blizzard unfolds with the inevitability of a dream (or a horror novel), building tension at first subtly, then with a stunning intensity. But the power of the surface horror story – as effective as it is – is something of a mask; there is a deeper story here, a story of grief and loss, which bubbles under the surface (the subtle clues are easy to miss on the first reading) before coming to a full boil in the book’s final pages.

Illustration: Athena Gubbe.

Johnston’s storytelling is mirrored and supported by the force of Gubbe’s art. At once strong but powerfully subtle, the individual panels function in the same way as the writing: building horror while simultaneously guiding the reader toward the cathartic climax of the story. Gubbe’s art is direct but somewhat stylized, and in the partnership between author and writer the art is at least as significant as the writing (this is far from always the case with graphic novels). As a result, The Haunted Blizzard will reward repeated reading, both for close study and for the sheer beauty of two artists at the peak of their respective crafts.