"Prison sentence leads to writing for author with new book of Indigenous horror"
Author of the article:
Eric Volmers
Publishing date: Oct 21, 2022 The Calgary Herald
Article abridged
When Alex Soop was a child living with his grandparents on the Kainai Nation, his uncle would tell him wild horror stories, including many that were set on the grounds of the former St. Paul’s residential school.
At that time, the school had been shuttered for nearly 20 years. But it was close to where Soop lived with his grandparents and he would often enter the old grounds on a dare, even though he was officially forbidden to set foot in the place. His uncle was the late Everett Soop, who would go on to become a renowned political cartoonist. But, at the time, he was known to young Alex as Uncle Buno and he introduced his nephew to oral storytelling, a proud Blackfoot tradition, by way of spine-tingling tales of horror set among the ruins of a place where real-life horror had taken place generations earlier. As an introduction to Indigenous horror, it was definitely on the nose.
Of course, Soop likely did not know what Indigenous horror was at the time. In fact, it probably wasn’t really a thing at all, at least in a literary sense. Nor would the Calgary-based writer have had any idea that he would dabble in the fledgling subgenre himself decades later with his debut of short stories, Midnight Storm, Moonless Sky.
“It was all in disarray and neglected,” Soop says about the old residential school. “The only thing that sat was the red-brick structure. Everything else – the insides, the windows – were all broken. So, at night, it had that really eerie feel when the moon was over it. As a kid, I had those imaginative stories in my head. As I got older and became a writer, they all came out.”
A longtime fan of horror movies and the novels of Stephen King, Soop said he began reading the work of Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor and other native writers. He saw writing as a way to entertain.
The stories in Midnight Storm are certainly entertaining but they can also be relentlessly dark, and not just in traditional, bump-in-the-night sense of the horror story. The opener, An Unlikely Turn of Events, for instance, contains few hallmarks of the genre. It tells the simple tale of a recovering alcoholic and former inmate whose relationship with a racist he encounters at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting takes a strange twist. The Wail of the Wind, on the other hand, is a period piece that involves a windigo, a frightening supernatural figure who often shows up in First Nations as a monstrous, cannibalistic killer. In the Kafkaesque Man of God, the titular character must atone for sins committed at a residential school in a banal version of purgatory. But even the stories that take the wildest flights of the horrifying and supernatural often contain elements of modern Indigenous horrors, from residential schools to missing and murdered women, and issues such as racism and alcoholism.
“I just want regular society to know that these are problems we face daily and they are strong,” Soop says. “Most people don’t understand the after-effects of the residential school system. I wanted people to realize through my writing we’ve suffered through a lot of this stuff.”
More than one character in Midnight Storm, Moonless Sky has incarceration in their background. Much of Spooked takes place in a prison and was inspired by an inmate Soop met while he was serving his own sentence in Drumheller Institution.
On Easter Sunday in 2016, Soop was driving in Calgary with a blood-alcohol level more than three times the legal limit when he lost control of his pickup truck and slammed head-on into an oncoming jeep. The crash killed a 62-year-old man and seriously injured his wife. Two others were also injured in a second vehicle that Soop struck.
Soop was 30 at the time and had a long history of alcoholism. Court heard that it intensified after his sister committed suicide and both his cousin and girlfriend were murdered.
In prison, Soop began experimenting with writing, initially by hand.
“I was out of my element,” he says. “In (prison) there were a lot of violent people: gangsters, drug dealers. They were not my kind of people, so to get my head out of the space I stayed by myself most of the time and wrote. I got my head in my own world. It helped. People didn’t bug
After he was released, he continued writing while attending Bow Valley College where a supportive teacher who was impressed with Soop’s essays encouraged him to take writing more seriously.
His first book of short stories was picked up by Calgary’s Durvile & UpRoute Books. Soop, who has a number of novels underway, has been clean and sober since his release. He is employed at the Grey Eagle Resort and Casino and continues to attend AA meetings.
Soop says he realizes that he will never escape his troubled past and will always be associated with the fatality.
“People are always going to see that first,” he says. “But I’ve changed my life. I’m not the same guy.”
Alex Soop will hold a book launch at Memorial Park Library on Oct. 25 at 7 p.m.