I've been reading a lot of straightforward, unadorned prose lately, so it was nice to slip into Cherie Dimaline's rich, image-heavy language. Empire of Wild follows Joan, a Métis woman who finds her missing husband after a year apart, only to discover that he is living a new life, under a new name, and has no memory of her. Although everyone in the congregation of missionaries with whom he works insists that Joan is delusional, she realizes that he is in the clutches of a rougarou, and only she can save him. The hook for this novel is something like "woman finds missing husband, but he's suddenly a werewolf preacher!" and well, kind of, but there's more going on in this story. Realizing what Dimaline is doing with her narrative is part of the pleasure of reading it, so I'm not going to spell it out, but I will say that I think this is a book well worth reading for fans of horror and magical realism.