Return of the Trickster

The third and final installment of Eden Robinson's Trickster trilogy, Return of the Trickster follows Jared Martin, a young Indigenous man in British Columbia who has recently discovered he is a Trickster, a shape-shifting supernatural being descended from the transforming raven Wee'git. In the previous books, Jared transported Georgina, an ogress who is Wee'git's sister (her true name is Jwasins), and her pack of coy wolves, coyote-wolf hybrids who wear magical human skins, to an airless parallel universe. The coy wolves suffocated, including a child named Cedar, but Georgina survived.

The novel opens with Jared in the Kitimat General Hospital emergency ward, dehydrated and vomiting. He staggers to the bathroom, where he begins expelling what appear to be his own organs. Wee'git, his biological father, contacts him mind to mind and instructs him to will his organs back into his body, explaining that Jared has pushed far past his magical limits. Jared manages to reabsorb them, though his liver briefly sprouts limbs and resists. Wee'git warns him not to use any more magic or he will disintegrate.

Philip Martin, the man who raised Jared as his stepdad, takes him home to Terrace. Jared cannot sleep because flashbacks of Georgina cracking his bones and eating him alive replay behind his closed eyes, and he is tormented by guilt over killing the coy wolves. Phil encourages Jared to call his mother, Maggie, a fiercely protective woman, and his aunt Mave, with whom Jared had been living in Vancouver while attending school. Mave arranges for Jared's cousin Kota, his Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety buddy, to drive up from Vancouver to collect him.

During the long drive south, Jared dreams of Georgina manipulating the inhabitants of the other universe and taunting him with promises to hurt his family. After an early-morning AA meeting near Vancouver, Jared and Kota arrive at Mave's apartment in East Vancouver. When Maggie embraces Jared, they share an overwhelming mind-to-mind connection. But when Jared whispers that he is a Trickster, Maggie recoils, convinced he is Wee'git in disguise, because Wee'git once infiltrated the family by posing as her mother Anita's son. Maggie storms out with her boyfriend, Richie, leaving Jared devastated.

The narrative periodically shifts to second-person chapters from Wee'git's perspective. These sections reveal that Wee'git was trapped at his own gravesite after Maggie shot his head off, until baby Jared unconsciously summoned him with raw Trickster power. Wee'git watched Jared grow up as an invisible companion but never truly bonded with him. His sister Jwasins found and resurrected him; she had become an ogress over centuries by consuming magical beings. He gave her the names of his other children but tried to hide Jared.

Sophia Martin, Phil's wealthy and formidable mother who once considered Jared her grandson, takes him to meet Charles Hucker, a Wild Man of the Woods, the term for the beings commonly called sasquatches. On Chuck's property near Whistler, Jared is drawn to a chief tree, a spiritually powerful red cedar that radiates light and communicates with him. Chuck explains that Jared's organs are rebelling because he has burned through nearly all his magical power and warns him never to borrow power from others.

Back at Mave's, Jared tries to tell his aunt the truth, but Mave, firmly skeptical of the supernatural, dismisses it as superstition. A girl named Mallory approaches Jared in three seemingly random encounters, claiming they know each other. Neeka, the otter-in-human-form girlfriend of Jared's neighbor Hank, later reveals that Mallory is her estranged sister and a dangerous criminal who tortured otter elders to steal their power.

The crisis escalates when Phil and his wife Shirley are murdered in a home invasion, an act of coy wolf revenge. Shattered by guilt, Jared steals money from Mave and goes on a drinking binge. He tracks David, Maggie's violent ex-boyfriend, and finds him terrified in his truck, surrounded by ghosts. Coy wolves capture both of them and take them to a compound near the Tsawwassen ferry terminal, where they torture David as a demonstration. During the ordeal, Jared's organs rebel and escape his body. Maggie and Richie storm the compound with firearms. Maggie kills the coy wolves and then deliberately stabs David through the heart. Sarah, Jared's ex-girlfriend and a young woman with latent supernatural powers, tracks Jared through their psychic connection and helps collect his escaped organs.

At a motel afterward, Jared summons Phil's ghost, who sings "You Are My Sunshine" as he fades into light. In a raw conversation, Maggie reveals that Wee'git impersonated Phil to seduce her when she was sixteen, and she considers it rape. She instructs Jared to change his surname from Martin to Moody to distance himself from Sophia, who has become dangerously unstable in her grief.

Jared returns to Mave's and endures a painful withdrawal from alcohol, with Kota watching over him. He discovers that his young cousin Eliza, who has powerful supernatural sight, is being menaced by a giant spirit octopus, the ghost of her abusive dead father, and other threats. Jared transfers all his protective warding onto Eliza, leaving himself defenseless. Maggie identifies a skeletal creature in Jared's bedroom wall as an undead sorcerer feeding on his power.

Jared's maternal grandmother, Anita "Granny Nita" Moody, arrives in Vancouver and uses her deep spiritual power to burn Georgina's hex from Jared's heart, a spell that had prevented him from speaking about the ogress. The effort severely drains her. When Jared discovers that Sophia has been overtaken by something inhuman that demands he bring Jwasins back, he and Wee'git arrange an evacuation to Chuck's fortified cabin.

Before they can leave, Jared receives a devastating psychic broadcast: Mallory and a new group of coy wolves have captured Maggie and Richie. Richie is torn apart and killed, and Mallory severs Maggie's right hand. Jared surrenders himself to the coy wolves to save his mother. At a remote farmhouse, the gutted but still-living bear Trickster's pituitary gland enters Jared's body and communicates mind to mind, explaining that when Jared pulls Georgina through dimensions, he can reshape her form without causing direct harm, since her protection spells prevent lethal injury.

Working from afar, Sophia and Granny Nita use their combined power to burn the hexes from buried Tricksters' hearts and free them. Granny Nita expends all her remaining life force and dies. Sophia, overwhelmed by grief, pushes past the point of sustaining her own life to follow Anita.

The freed Tricksters' organs reform, destroying the coy wolves' human skins and leaving them in their animal forms. Jared pulls Georgina through the dimensional bridge and reshapes her into a giant chicken, a form that constrains her without causing direct harm. Sarah arrives with Chuck and his Wild Man allies, who bring the ogress down. Sophia, surrounded by a cloud of invisible creatures, arrives and kills the remaining coy wolves but, in her altered state, begins eating Jared's flesh. Jared reaches her through their shared memories, and she comes back to herself, horrified. She heals his wounds and tells him to save his mother. Inside the farmhouse, Maggie has strangled Mallory to death. Jared cuts his mother free and holds her.

In the epilogue, Sophia pays for Jared's rehab and adopts him into her clan. He studies diagnostic medical sonography and reopens the portal to free friends trapped in a pocket universe. Jared gives Wee'git's Kitsilano house to the otters as compensation for Wee'git's betrayal of Neeka's ancestor, the Otter Woman. He gives Granny Nita's settlement money to Maggie and Mave, and Granny Nita's house to Eliza and her mother, Olive. Maggie joins Richie's mother's coven in Winnipeg and later falls in love with a Druid in Scotland. Mave finishes her first novel and travels with her partner, Justice. Sarah studies magic with Chuck. Kota marries his boyfriend, and Hank and Neeka eventually marry and have three children.