Book Review

By Derryll White

Sandford, John (1990). Shadow Prey.

Minneapolis-St. Paul in Minnesota is an urban jungle similar to Winnipeg – a large corporate/residential blot on the earth with a large number of urban Indians jammed into the unseen corners. In both places the native people compose a significant under-class. They are seen as part of the landscape – no rights, no privileges, perhaps an exploited resource that is not really human. Wrong!

John Sandford takes a hard look at this social madness in ‘Shadow Prey.’ He asks the questions about how society abuses the under-class, Indians and others (Americans still refer to First Nations people as Indians). Then he asks even bigger questions about life. What is it to live? Are we ever ready to die? Lucas Davenport lets out some of his inner darkness and people around him have to find ways to deal with that – not easy for them or him.

That is probably why Sandford is such an incredibly successful author. The story moves fast with tight action and suspense, real sex and humour. But there are these other questions for readers to ponder while they are thoroughly entertained.

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Excerpts from the novel:

INDIAN COUNTRY – It took forever for the time to come. When it did, he rode downtown on the suburban, pinching out his emotions, one by one. Thinking back to his hours on Bear Butte, the arid, stoic beauty of the countryside. The distant scream of the Black Hills, raped by the whites who promoted each natural mystery with a chrome-yellow billboard.

URBAN INDIANS – “It looks pretty bad,” she said sadly. They were ten minutes off the expressway, in a neighborhood of tired yards. The postwar frame houses were crumbling from age, poor quality and neglect: roofs were missing shingles, eaves showed patches of dry rot. In the dim illumination of the streetlights, they could see kids’ bikes dumped unceremoniously on the weedy lawns. The cars parked in the streets were exhausted hulks. Oil stains marked the driveways like Rorschachs of failure.

LIFE – “When I think about dying… I can’t think about dying. I’m not ready.”

“Nobody ever is,” Barbara said. “I look at myself in the mirror on the door….” She pushed the bedroom door shut, and the full-length mirror mounted on the back reflected the two of them, naked, looking into it. “… and I see this old woman, shrivelled up like last year’s potato. A clerk at the historical society, all gray and bent over. But I feel like I’m eighteen. I want to go out and run in the park with the wind in my hair, and I want to roll around on the grass with you and Aaron and hear Aaron putting the bullshit on me, trying to get into my pants… and I can’t do any of that because I’m old. And I’m going to die. I don’t want to be old and I don’t want to die, but I will… I’m not ready, but I’m going.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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