REVIEW: White Horse

I was so excited to read this book! A Native horror story written by a Native woman, Erika T. Wurth, White Horse follows Kari, a brusque, metalhead, whisky-swilling, horror-loving bartender as she comes into contact with the spirit world. Her mother, dead or missing since Kari was just two days old, comes to her in deeply unsettling visions, trying to explain her disappearance.

The premise sounds like a perfect setup for a spooky novel, but for me, a lot of it fell flat. Mainly I couldn’t stop cringing at the main character and her conversations. Kari is moody, sarcastic, and has a self-proclaimed “edgy” sense of humor. The author backs the character into a corner where she is forced to be an almost one-dimensional caricature of what a metalhead horror-lover might be: throwing up “devil horns,” wearing tight black jeans and “a Nicholsonesque smile,” and generally just being kind of a dick.

The conversations are stilted and unrealistic, pulling me out of the book every time an argument breaks out between Kari and her cousin’s asshole husband (who [spoiler alert] we’re just supposed to be okay with by the end). All of this combined with the amount of dreams sequences I slogged through made it tough for me to finish. (My dad always said that if you’re writing about dreams, your reader is falling asleep and I stand by that.)

All that being said, the premise was spooky and I loved all of the Native references and stories. As the book went on, the flashbacks to Kari’s mother became a bit more seamless. The lore and history of her family drew me in in a way that the actual characters did not manage to do. (Also, they kept introducing new characters literally up until the last few chapters which was super confusing). I related to Kari’s love of horror – would I be able to realize if my life became a horror novel? How much would I let slide before I wanted to go in for a brain MRI?

I would love to see and read more horror novels written by authors of color, but this one simply did not do it for me! Too many characters and too many storylines for a 300-page novel to really flesh out the important parts.

RATING: 2/5