Coyote Rage
by Owl Goingback
Summary
In Galun'lati, the spirit world of Cherokee tradition, the Great Council of animals still meets, and mankind holds a seat that the animals long ago, grudgingly, conceded. Coyote has decided to take it back. The Trickster's plan is simple and genocidal: kill the human representatives to the Council, end humanity's voice in the order of things, and let the old world take the new one back. Raven overhears, and the war that follows is fought across both worlds at once.
The human seat runs through one bloodline: Luther Watie, an old Cherokee man who knows exactly what is hunting him, and his estranged daughter Sarah Reynolds, a Florida mortician who knows nothing of her inheritance until the attacks begin, wolves where wolves cannot be, a shapeshifter in a business suit, a father she buried resurfacing in dreams with warnings. Goingback runs the pursuit as a chase thriller with folklore's rules: Raven turning his skin inside out to walk as a man, Coyote recruiting the skinwalkers and witches of several nations' nightmares, and the geography sliding between interstate America and the spirit country where the old agreements were cut.
The tone is the signature, dread cut with the Trickster's actual humor, the killer cracking jokes because Coyote has always been both, the sacred clown and the flood bringer in one skin, and the book's scariest scenes are the ones where the joke and the knife arrive together.
Around two hundred twenty pages, brisk and unpretentious.
Best for readers who want horror built from Native cosmology by a writer of the old campfire school, myth treated as working machinery rather than decoration.
Historical Context & Significance
Coyote Rage won the Bram Stoker Award for 2019, and the night belonged to Owl Goingback twice over: the Horror Writers Association gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in the same season, the double recognition arriving more than two decades after Crota, his 1996 debut, had won the Stoker for first novel, making him one of the few writers honored by the award at both ends of a career.
Goingback, who describes himself as of Cherokee and Choctaw descent, had spent that career almost alone on his ground: Native American horror built from tribal tradition was a shelf of nearly one for decades, and his win directly preceded the breakthrough seasons of Stephen Graham Jones and the visibility of Indigenous horror as a movement, a sequencing the community noted, the elder honored as the wave he anticipated arrived.
The small press publication of the winning novel told the era's other story: the Stoker's openness, unusual among major awards, to work from far outside the conglomerates.