Empire of Wild
Joan, a Metis woman in Georgian Bay, Ontario, has been searching for her husband Victor for nearly a year when she stumbles on a revival tent at the edge of a Walmart parking lot. The preacher inside, who calls himself Reverend Eugene Wolff, looks exactly like Victor but insists he has never met her. Cherie Dimaline draws on the Metis legend of the rogarou, a werewolf like figure used to warn community members away from danger, to build a contemporary novel about loss, marriage, and the long pressure of resource extraction on indigenous land. Published in 2019, the book sits alongside her earlier The Marrow Thieves as a major contribution to contemporary indigenous fiction in Canada. It mixes a love story, a mystery, and a quietly menacing supernatural thread.
What you might want to know about Empire of Wild
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A Metis woman searching for her missing husband finds a charismatic preacher who looks exactly like him.
No. It is a separate novel set in a contemporary world rather than the dystopian one of The Marrow Thieves.
It is more atmospheric and unsettling than overtly horrifying, with horror elements rising from a Metis legend.
Empire of Wild was written by Cherie Dimaline.
Empire of Wild is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.