Facing Horror with Uncertainty: The Many Ways One Can be Unfinished, a guest post by Cheryl Isaacs

The Unfinished is all about finding the bravery to face uncertainty in many ways – in one’s relationships, identity and creepy monsters that haunt the forest. When we meet her, Avery is content to drift through life, making no firm commitments to anyone or anything, and brave is definitely not how she’d describe herself. There are plenty of things in her life she isn’t happy with, but she would rather live with them than take action and step into the unknown risking humiliation and hurt. It’s only when an undeniable threat appears, when the Ragged Man starts stealing people from town and targeting her loved ones, that Avery is forced to abandon her waffling ways and make some hard choices – what does she want? What is she willing to risk? Who is she, really?

Avery’s relationships with others are fraught with uncertainty and lack of clarity. She agonizes about how much to share, who to ask for help – if anyone, and how to negotiate whether pursuing her most cherished, private dreams are worth the fear of rejection. After stumbling on the black water and things start to get creepy in her life, she confides in no one, afraid of speaking it into life but also of having her friends Stella and Key view her as unstable. Her unwillingness to confront others’ perceptions of her lead her to hold back and ultimately make things worse.

Avery’s connections with both her mom and dad are fractured in different ways. Her mom tries to get so close that Avery feels the need to push her away, to withhold events she thinks will upset her mother, such as being stalked by an evil swamp demon. Her dad is both distant emotionally and physically absent, leaving Avery convinced that his lack of interest in her is the root cause but not brave enough to find out for sure. The state of both of these relationships leaves Avery even more adrift, feeling that her parents can’t give her support or advice because they need to be protected to safeguard the perceived precarious nature of their connections to each other.

But Avery’s lack of bravery doesn’t just extend to other people. Her lack of clarity and honesty with herself mean that other relationships are unrealized, like her very desired but too-scary-to-ask-for bump up from friendship to romance with Key. Her uncertainty about Key’s reaction leads her to stay silent, to not ask for what she wants at the risk of losing what she has.  There are vague plans to go to university on a scholarship and but go no further than that because Avery doesn’t know what kind of life she’d like to build for her future self. Unsure of who she really is and where she belongs, Avery has trouble trusting herself to make the right choices.

Navigating relationships with others is not easy. It involves making judgements about how other people feel, what they believe and what they want. It’s even more difficult if you aren’t sure of who you are.  Avery has lived most of her life disconnected from her Indigenous culture, a fact that makes itself known in small but hurtful ways, like reminding her great-aunt to speak English, the only language Avery understands. When the only source of information about the Ragged Man requires her to reconnect with her culture, Avery initially resists, fearing that feeling like she doesn’t belong is preferable to having it proven as fact. Through Foster, Avery has the chance to understand what her culture has to offer and why it’s worth pursuing. The bleakness of Foster’s life and his momentous regret over past failure give Avery a glimpse of the kind of life that a lack of bravery and hiding from the truth will get her. Once she understands that her culture and community have been there for her all along, Avery is able to use that strength to face off with the Ragged Man and his minions.

Faced with the prospect of losing what she has, Avery finally overcomes her uncertainty and fears and jumps into action. The people that disappear from town return as hollowed-out, zombie minions of the Ragged Man – the Unfinished. These mindless drones are the manifestation of living one’s life with uncertainty. They feel nothing, have nothing, and are nothing but slaves to endlessly doing whatever they’re told, even if that means hurting people they previously cared for. Avery has to decide what to do, how to fight them and who to listen to. And finally chooses herself. It’s her newfound confidence and determination that allows her to make excruciating choices about who she will save, once and for all rejecting her previous life of uncertainty. Avery is no longer content with unasked questions and vague future plans. To have any chance at the life she now knows she wants, she has to take action and does, with the help of the friends she’s drawn in around her and the culture that welcomes her back with open arms.

By the end of The Unfinished, Avery is well on her way to leaving that title behind and moving toward the finished version of who she’s always wanted to be. She’s clear on where she belongs and what she wants. The experience of being faced with her possible bleak, dead-eyed future changes her perspective on being brave and the truth that possible failure isn’t enough to warrant giving up on the possible reward. She’s discovered that what’s truly scary is not asking the big questions, never risking being hurt and denying who she is. By being brave and claiming the life that will make her truly happy, Avery finds that she can be an agent of change for others as well, like her mother, who sees Avery’s bravery and decides to let go of the past in favour of a better future. I hope The Unfinished can do the same for its readers.

Meet the author

Cheryl Isaacs is a white/Indigenous writer and educator based in southern Ontario. The Unfinished is her debut novel.

www.cherylisaacs.ca

About The Unfinished

In her stunning debut, Cheryl Isaacs (Mohawk) pulls the reader into an unsettling tale of monsters, mystery, and secrets that refuse to stay submerged.

When small-town athlete Avery’s morning run leads her to a strange pond in the middle of the forest, she awakens a horror the townspeople of Crook’s Falls have long forgotten.

The black water has been waiting. Watching. Hungry for the souls it needs to survive. 

Avery can smell the water, see it flooding everywhere; she thinks she’s losing her mind. And as the black water haunts Avery—taking a new form each time—people in town begin to go missing.

Though Avery had heard whispers of monsters from her Kanien’kéha:ka (Mohawk) relatives, she has never really connected to her Indigenous culture or understood the stories. But the Elders she has distanced herself from now may have the answers she needs.

When Key, her best friend and longtime crush, is the next to disappear, Avery is faced with a choice: listen to the Kanien’kéha:ka and save the town but lose her friend forever…or listen to her heart and risk everything to get Key back.

An unmissable horror novel for readers who devoured Trang Thanh Tran’s She Is a Haunting or Claire Legrand’s Sawkill Girls! 

ISBN-13: 9780063287389
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 09/03/2024
Age Range: 13 – 17 Years

Filed under: Guest Post