Passing Through a Prairie Country
Dennis E. Staples
Counterpoint Press
One of the most persistent tropes in horror is that of the “Indian burial ground” — a cursed spot, redolent of something older, upon which we scaffold our modern structures only to have something evil come grabbling from the ground. In its slightly more enlightened manifestations, the trope is that the evil of extermination has come back to haunt Americans, who build on bloody soil. It is a retribution, not a nameless dread.
Regardless of whether the device is used to make a Big Statement or simply because it is creepy, there’s an underlying idea: the Natives are dead and gone, and only their ghosts remain.
A new generation of Native horror writers (and less-terrifying writers, activists, and educators) have challenged this pernicious myth, and have written books which center the contemporary indigenous experience. The most prominent of these is probably Stephen Graham Jones, whose The Only Good Indian was secretly radical: the monster wasn’t a metaphor for America, but a Native legend, which still existed under (or over) the steamrolling catastrophe of colonization.
This idea — of persistence, of continuity, of existence — is a prominent one in Dennis E. Staples’s new novel, Passing Through a Prairie Country. Set largely in a haunted Minnesota tribal casino, the characters around which the book rotates are flesh and blood, flawed and normal, spiritual and troubled, and, most of all, contemporary. This is a modern horror novel, whose message is that not everything can be renovated.
The novel is an unbilled sequel to Staples’s debut, This Town Sleeps, and follows the story of several of the first book’s main characters. It can be read on its own (this author had not read the first novel), as the characters are well-drawn, with dialogue and passing thoughts doing the heavy expository lifting.
Staples, an Ojibwe writer of the Red Lake Nation, breathes the Upper Midwest through his story. It is cold and flat, dark skies and early souls, a long November feeling even as the book moves through the fall and winter. Each chapter focuses on a character and a specific date and time, with our focus on two primary characters and another few minor ones of greater or lesser importance.
And, of course, the Sandman, an ancient evil that haunts the Hidden Atlantis casino, a glimmering beacon of glamor, employment, community, and desperate hope on the fictional Languille Lake reservation.
The Sandman – and there’s no easy way to put this – takes your dreams and turns them into nightmares, pulling you through realities, and sometimes killing you. He takes a characters’ pasts, all their mistakes and fears, all the horrors they’ve inflicted upon themselves and others, and twists them in a surreal web.
I say there’s “no easy way to put this” because Staples puts you square in the dreams, sometimes without a lead-up, and the writing is an intentionally confusing jumble of images and ideas. It can be disorienting for the reader, but also puts you in the mind of someone being consumed by the Sandman’s malevolence.
The story revolves around our characters trying to get rid of the Sandman. The primary characters are Marion Lafournier, young, gay, recovering from a relationship and substance abuse, and his cousins, Alana Bullhead and Cherie, who work security at the casino.
Initially, after talking to his cousins at the casino, he’s given a task: get the spirit of a mutual uncle off the local road and drive it to a safer place. See, there are dead along one of the desolate roads leading to the casino. They can’t seem to leave the area, something that is suspected to be connected to the Sandman. The ghosts sometimes slip into cars and make trouble. And Marion, who has some skills at communicating with the dead (though he isn’t as spiritually powerful as Alana) can possibly pick up the uncle, who was murdered in the book’s introduction, and shepard him somewhere better. But it is here that Marion’s destiny and the plans of the Sandman collide.
We learn why the Sandman exists, and from where his evil springs, as the book unfolds. It is not a spoiler to say that the Sandman isn’t a metaphor for any particular evil, but rather the outcome of evil that can linger in a land soaked with blood. He torments the Ojibwe. His goals are not colonial. He seemingly, in an interesting and unspoken way, barely notices the existence of white newcomers. The Sandman was born from violence done outside of settlers, within the nation. Its spirit would exist regardless of American greed and violence.
The spirituality is taken for granted by the characters. It isn’t particularly mystical, nor is it anything remarkable. It is just a fact of life, even if Marion doesn’t think he’s very good at it, and even if Alana loses her powerful second sight more often than not. Even the Sandman, as terrifying as he is, seems normal to them. It isn’t surprising that there is something there at the casino.
The casino itself holds an interesting place in the book, with a certain ambivalent menace. It’s a place where locals can get jobs, yes. And of course there’s the grimy counterpoint, this garish monument to capitalism, drunkenness, and the possibility of ruin built to placate the tubes. But that contrast is too easy for Staples, who also presents it as a community. When Marion first walks into the Hidden Atlantis (its name a nice reference to a disappeared nation, only with Atlantis its destruction was a force of nature, not man), he remembers his grandmother.
“In the last few months, she was frail and wheelchair-bound, but the moment we passed through the front doors and saw the rainbow of electric lights on the machines, her spirits lifted. She taught me how to use the slot machines, what lines and bets meant, and how to rub the screens as the reels spun to trigger the bonus game. All those old-fashioned casino superstitions.
I still see patrons trying this as I walk through the gold-and-blue-lined walls of Hidden Atlantis. Some are falling asleep in their seats. Some are visibly tweaking. Others chain-smoke cheap cigarettes and stare as their money spins down to zero. Even so, there’s still a lot more smiles than frowns in the glittering crowd. It could be worth a few dollars.”
It’s not exactly glamorous, and perhaps to some readers it would be tacky and disorienting and gross, but it isn’t to the characters. To any of them. It’s part of their home, their histories, their community. They are probably going to lose, yeah, but life is loss. Life is filled with addiction and recovery, with leavings and failure, with some happiness, but always with death. So why not spin the wheel.
In making the Hidden Atlantis at least partly Native, and not just a colonizing imposition, Staples creates continuity within the Midwest setting. There is the past, and the present, and while they might seem very different, it is still the same land. Mourning ghosts and spinning roulette wheels can coexist.
This casino backdrop can be transposed with the horrors of the spirit world. In the prologue, the soon-to-be-departed Uncle Froglegs leaves the casino and sees what he thinks are people on the road, but, “as they got closer, one of them, a young Ojibwe man, disappeared like candle smoke. His body became a thin, snaking wisp of fog. Others faded in and out of view. Some twitched and convulsed like spiders who’d cruelly had several legs removed by wayward children.”
Yes, this could be set ironically against the modern clings and clangs of the casino, but doesn’t any death stand in terrible contrast to the life it is leaving? The point isn’t that the casino has brought the horror of the Sandman, it is just that it is where his home is. The Sandman existed before, a creature of Native doing, and the world that was built over it barely registers.
This world is real. The characters are real. They exist in our world — they are straight and gay (indeed, a Grindr-like hooking-up app plays very prominently), they have phones and drug problems, they love their Native heritage and don’t resent the casino. These are not uneasy contradictions; the people, the land, and the ghosts that live on it are a palimpsest. The dreams the Sandman takes aren’t fantasies, they are memories.
Even with a winking nod to the Indian Burial Ground trope, Passing Through a Prairie Country isn’t just about the dead. It’s about those that have lived and died, and still live and die, on this cold and sacred land.