Trail of Lightning

Monsters serve as a major antagonistic force throughout Trail of Lightning. In the novel, they represent the opposite of humanity, a group of Others to avoid, to fear, and to destroy. The primary monster that characters must face in Trail of Lightning is the tsé naayéé’, a combination of organic matter and human flesh that eats people. There are, however, other monsters and evil creatures, including witches, who are humans who have traded their souls for their magic. The presence of supernatural others defines the Sixth World (the world after the Big Water). Characters fear and fight monsters, and they look to specialists like Maggie and immortals like Neizghání to help fight them. Maggie’s job as a monster hunter exists only because of the danger that these monsters represent. The first few chapters of the novel show this potential for danger in great detail as Maggie tracks the monster who kidnapped an innocent little girl. The little girl’s family hire Maggie, and the mother asks her, “Do you have clan powers? [...] Like him, the Monsterslayer. The rumor is you do” (6). Maggie’s clan powers and training by Neizghání give her the skills to defeat these supernatural creatures, abilities that make Maggie notable to others. However, Roanhorse further reveals the danger of monsters in Maggie’s world when Maggie is unable to save the little girl, tainted by the monster who tried to eat her.

The taint of monster, or the ability of different monsters to infect those around them, terrifies the characters of Trail of Lightning. When Maggie discovers that the little girl whom she was hired to save has been infected by the wounds of the cannibalistic tsé naayéé’, Maggie must kill the girl. Afterwards Maggie is sickened and wonders, “I can’t help but think that if this was the right thing to do, why does it feel so fucking wrong?” (16). Maggie only killed this girl, an act that disgusts her, because even death is better than becoming a monster. Later in the novel, Maggie and Kai encounter another form of monster infection when they find the town of Crownpoint overrun with ch’į́įdii, the evil, ghostly residue of dead people that can infect humans around them with a ghost sickness. Although Kai and Maggie manage to escape these ch’į́įdii, this type of monster represents an incorporeal and even more difficult-to-battle enemy of humanity.

Maggie herself is intimately familiar with the idea of being infected by monsters. As she reveals to Kai at Crownpoint, she herself was once infected by the ghost sickness. In addition, throughout the novel Maggie feels constantly as if she herself were a monster. As a result of Neizghání’s abandonment of her for her skill in killing, Maggie feels that she is destined to slip into monstrosity. This self-doubt angers Kai at one point, and he asks Maggie, “Who fed you such a total crock of shit? […] who convinced you that all you are is a killer?” (233). Eventually he realizes it was Neizghání, even though Maggie idolized him. It is only when Maggie overcomes the impacts of her relationship with Neizghání that she can gain the self-confidence to truly feel human.

The world of Trail of Lightning is not our own: It is the Sixth World. The Sixth World is that which occurs after the Big Water, an apocalyptic flood that wiped out a substantial portion of North America. This is the extension of the Diné conception of the Five Worlds present in their creation stories. As Coyote explains to Kai in the novel, he and the other Holy People lived through five distinct worlds, each of which ended in a flood. Now, in the Sixth World, Holy People again walk the earth among both humans and monsters. Before the Big Water, during the Fifth World, there were the Energy Wars. These were the wars of wealthy people who had hoarded natural resources fought for access to waning sources of energy. Others act similarly in the Sixth World, although they hoard other resources, like water. As Kai puts it, “Greed is universal […] seems anywhere there’s a natural resource, there’s someone willing to hoard it for themselves to make more money than they can spend” (54). These Energy Wars mimic the obsessions of fossil fuels that occupy much of our own world (the world of the readers). The Big Flood, while a sudden event in the novel, also represents a sped-up version of the rising waters that threaten Roanhorse’s reader’s environment. By associating the Big Flood and the changing of worlds with events like the Energy Wars, Roanhorse places her novel in a post-climate-change world.

In the aftermath of the Energy Wars, the Diné built the Wall. Maggie remembers the story of when the wall was built, thinking:

the Wall took on a life of its own. When the workmen came back the next morning, it was already fifty feet high. In the east it grew as white shell. In the south, turquoise. The west, pearlescent curves of abalone, and the north, the blackest jet. It was beautiful. It was ours. And we were safe (22).

This wall protects those inside it from the “damned Big Water nightmare” beyond (258), but even it cannot protect the valley inside from the effects of climate change. Maggie’s environment within the valley bears the heated marks of climate change. This heat, while certain present in the American Southwest that readers know today, is intensified to the extent that travel during mid-day is impossible. In addition, the very wall that protected Dinétah from the Big Water isolates this community from the outside world. This isolation leads to a society of Diné who govern and protect themselves, apart from non-Indigenous peoples. The world inside the Wall is entirely Dinétah, even down to the immortals like Coyote and Neizghání and the fantastical monsters like the tsé naayéé’. This life, however, is also one characterized by a dystopian scarcity of natural resources, where even coffee is a highly valued and scarce commodity.