Told in two timelines, from 2023 and the present, we meet Henry, a young Native American man living in Louisiana. In 2023, Henry is social and outgoing, loves playing his guitar on stage at the local bar, lives with his girlfriend, and makes YouTube videos visiting haunted sites. In the present, Henry is in a wheelchair due to a spinal cord injury. He is grieving his former life, lives with his grandparents, can no longer play the guitar, and has given up ghost hunting. A few tales are told of the haunted places Henry and his friends visit, the Whistler case being the most unsettling. A Native American tale says evil will be attracted if you whistle at night and Henry whistles after visiting an abandoned home where a family was killed. Could evil be attached to Henry? This was a unique horror book, eerie scenes and haunted places are combined with the struggles many disabled people face as well as the way non-disabled feel and act around them.

There’ are a lot of reasons Nick Medina’s books always jump to the front of my queue. I have no idea how he writes so well so fast, but his third book, THE WHISTLER, delivers on all of them in a tighter and even more intense story so that had me wound up enough that I jump scared when my cat’s tail went by in my peripheral vision during a climactic moment.
The horror: a sort of indigenous gothic that balances a knife blade of hallucinatory/real. The characters: flawed, fascinating, human, The story: never what you expect (especially this one), but always, ALWAYS, a tribute to those who are lost and hidden and forgotten.
Medina always talks about missing and murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in his books, whether or not they’re directly related to the story; his first novel has me looking up statistics and his second actually led me to change my plans for what I’m going to do with my body after death - I’m donating it to a body farm now which will, hopefully, one day, help families get closure on what happened to the women and two spirit individuals in their families who are found too late. What we really need to do, however, is use our privilege to bring this issue to the fore and work with members of indigenous communities to stop disappearances from happening by increasing resources and training community and peer counselors, etc. Trust won’t come easily but that’s on us. Start doing some work.