Thank god we’re all trapped indoors. Outdoors is scary, full of birds that peck you, and marmots that bite your fingers, and insects that want to suck your blood. It’s safer just to leave outside to the horrible animals and forget about ever feeling the sun on your skin again because did you know the sun gives you cancer??? Outside is the worst, and according to this 1994 Canadian, YA horror novel, Call of the Wendigo, that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. It’s the only novel editor and gay activist Robin Hardy ever published under his own name (Hardy's other work includes The Day the Homos Disappeared and “Category Fiction and the Tyranny of Social Realism”) but he wrote it to warn us that if you thought the marmots were bad, wait until you get a load of the Wendigo.
What kind of people live in Canada? Sincere people, like Tyrone, a handsome teenager with chestnut hair and “a bright smile beaming across his olive face.” Tyrone works at the Keewatin Inn in Manitoba and his mom, Vivian, runs The Gracious Loon, their gift shop. Tyrone is honest and straightforward and says “eh” a lot. His favorite hobby is chopping wood outdoors, plaid shirt rolled up to expose his burly forearms.
What kind of people live in Canada? Noble people like White Eagle, an Ojibway medicine man or, “In my people's tongue, I am a ma-mandowin-ninih.” White Eagle says things like “My heart is water” and paddles around in his canoe, showing up at opportune moments, and generally lounging around in the dirt like being outside isn’t the most dangerous thing in the world.
What kind of people live in America? Assholes, mostly. And some bulimics. Like Marla, a child actor with an alcoholic mother (is there any other kind?) now a bulimic teenaged model. Her BFF Kyla isn't a bulimic but she is kind of a jerkwad and also a driven tennis player who takes Kyla on her date with rapper Cubbie Cube who tries to molest Marla, sending her spiraling into a nervous bulimic breakdown.
Pulling her bestie's head out of the toilet, Kyla decides that what Marla needs is to come with her on a trip to Canada where an intense tenni pro is holding an intense week-long retreat for other intense tennis players at the Keewatin Inn. On the plane they meet Mark Lorrington, an intense and wealthy asshole on his way to the tennis camp, too. His family owns the Keewatin Inn and he loves to do things like make fun of Canadians and mock the things like believe in like diversity, gay rights, and the Wendigo.
Although Canada is home to extremely nice and normal people, it is also Satan's petting zoo, home to a Hellish variety of dangerous animals, like man-eating Mooses who dwell on the bottom of lakes for hours without breathing, entangling unwary swimmers in their cruel antlers before drowning them. Or the Canada Goose, a flying monster that has been known to replace human children with their own hellspawn, plucked of their feathers so as to walk amongst us undetected. Many baby geese are raised for years by unsuspecting human parents who only discover this cruel goose trick when their children force them to put down an unrefundable deposit on their first semester at an Ivy League school, then rise into the air, honking with delight, and fly away, leaving their human “parents” heartbroken and humiliated. Then there is the Wendigo.
According to Robin Hardy, the Wendigo is 14 feet tall and covered with hair that's matted with rotting swamp moss. It has “eyes that roll in blood razor-sharp antlers like a moose, “teeth like steak knives, and lips that have been eaten away by parasites.” They can hypnotize people, or possess them, and they run so fast that they fly, often swooping down out of the sky and carrying people away. They're shapeshifters capable of getting teeny tiny or extremely large or disguising themselves as people. An island of them live in Hudson Bay? Or maybe they're ghosts? Their hearts and bones are made of ice, so fire and saunas are no good for them. Also, confusingly, they're referred to as cannibals which should mean they only eat other Wendigos, but actually means they only eat human beings. Why Canadians persist in going outside with something like the Wendigo on the loose is a mystery to civilized people everywhere.
The Keewatin Inn is specifically cursed with Wendigo infestation and when the tennis pro doesn't show up for reasons that are unclear, Mark and Tyrone, who have been besties since childhood, take the girls to make a bonfire outdoors because that’s what you do in Canada, then Mark unwisely sings the “Wendigo Song”:
Its lips are hungry blubbery,
And smacky,
Sucky,
Rubbery!
The wendigo!
The wendigo!
I saw it just a friend ago!
Last night, it lurked in Canada;
Tonight on your veranada!
Leaving aside the fact that it's impossible for something that has no lips to smack them, and the questionable wisdom or rhyming “Canada” with “veranada,” the bigger problem is that Mark's recital summons a Wendigo. It possesses Mark and pretty soon he's showing up in Marla's room to subject her to numerous #metoo moments. Eventually, she can't leave her room without Mark shoving her against a wall, grabbing her butt, or trying to eat her. She locks her door and hides, but too late! Another Wendigo flies in through her open window and takes her out for a freezing cold night flight through the clouds, taking her so high into orbit that they pass beeping satellites. As seductive as the Wendigo is, Marla decides that she doesn't want to become one, or to hook up with Mark, either, and instead she prefers a nice, simple Canadian boy like Tyrone, especially after she, Kyla, Mark, and Tyrone go camping and Mark chops up two local fishermen with a machete and eats one of their legs in front of everyone, then runs away into the woods, laughing maniacally. He's also growing antlers. On the plus side, becoming a Wendigo has made him a much better tennis player.
Inspired by life in the True North, strong and free, Kyla comes out of the closet to Marla, who is, in turn, so inspired by her best friend's bravery and commitment to diversity that she stops throwing up, and makes a play for Tyrone. Although, to be honest, it's hardly a big decision since Tyrone is the only boy at the Inn who hasn't killed and eaten a human being by this point. The book ends with Tyrone chopping off Mark-Wendigo's head with his log-chopping axe. But then the Wendigo that was trying to seduce Marla flies down and attacks them. However, it gets fought off by an even more evil Wendigo, who met Marla earlier while disguised as a Catholic priest, ministering to the poor and carrying a pet bat in his cassock. In case that seems adorable to you, allow me to point out that the priest chats with his pet bat via a tiny electrical device of his own design which translates subsonic bat squeaks into human language. And the bat uses this devise to declare its love for Marla, thereby proving that all outdoor animals are not only filthy and dangerous, but gross molesters and when you think you’re taking a healing hike in the woods all by yourself, ladies, and getting in touch with nature, nature is staring at your butt and imagining you naked.
The inappropriate bat dies in the fire that consumes its Wendigo owner after Tyrone gives it a kerosene shower and Marla strikes a match. The fiery end for the Wendigo and its tiny bat friend proves that while Canada's heart is big enough to accept the love between two men, two women, and a Wendigo and a human being, it is not yet big-hearted enough to accept the love between a bat and a woman. Canada, you may be full of horrible outdoor areas and dangerous animals, but it’s good to know that even you have hard limits.