The Cannibal Owl
By Aaron Gwyn.
Belle Point Press, 2025.
Paperback, 80 pages, $15.95.
Reviewed by Daniel Cowper.
The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn, is a novella about Levi English, a boy on the Texas frontier of the 1820s who grows up among a band of Comanche. It is inspired by a true story but feels like an emanation of folklore. Although the prose is richly textured and more suitable for savoring than skimming, the story is told with ruthless efficiency as it builds to its catastrophic climax.
When we meet Levi, he is a young boy living with his father, an Arkansas trapper. The boy’s mother is dead from the outset:
His mother had died of milk-sick the previous year. To Levi, her passing was like the passing of the moon: she was gleaming; she was gone. The fever that burned through her seemed to make her brighter for a spell. Her face shone like a jewel. Then she was laid out in a cherry wood box with coins over her eyelids as men filed past, holding their hats.
Later, Levi would wonder if this woman in his memory was the flesh-mother who’d born him into the world, or the story mother his father talked about—a figure painted on the sailcloth of his skull—and he came to believe Susanna English would return to him someday, just as the moon climbed back into the sky after its absence.
A page later, Levi’s father is peremptorily stabbed to death outside a trading post by an enemy the father disliked but failed to sufficiently fear. The orphaned boy is taken to Texas by his aunt and uncle, where his uncle beats him incessantly. To escape his uncle and to live among the natural phenomena into which he believes that his father’s soul “had merely receded,” Levi takes his gun and runs away.
After living wild for a summer, Levi approaches a band of Comanche “out of loneliness: he told himself it was the meat he smelled, but it was loneliness sure enough.” Two Wolf, the peacetime chieftain of the band, permits Levi to live among them, disregarding the objections of the war chief, Turns In Sunlight. An old bow maker, Poe-paya (whose daughter Morning Star is one of Two Wolf’s wives) becomes Levi’s custodian. Levi’s position among the Comanche is ambiguous and probationary from the start:
So even during story time, Poe-paya was watchful. Levi was watched by the other children as well. They were never hostile. They were merely curious, as if Levi was an animal they had taken for a pet, even though they weren’t supposed to. You kept an eye on such a beast. If something went awry, it would be your responsibility to put him down.
As he grows up among the Comanche, Levi is trained in their lifestyle but never truly becomes a member of the community. Poe-Paya becomes his adoptive father, and Levi is included with the other children when there is time for play:
Poe-paya officiated the games. There were a number of these but the favourite was Wasape, or “Bear.”
You made a small mound of dirt that was meant to be the sugar. Then the children formed a line facing the mound. Poe-paya drew a ring around the sugar, holding Levi by the heels and dragging him very slowly, his back and shoulders tracing a smooth place in the dirt. This set the children to giggling, and Levi giggled too—first time he’d laughed since his father was killed.
After Poe-paya had drawn the circle, Levi would run and get in line. Soon as he did, Poe-paya became Wasape. The old man lifted his hands above his head, fingers splayed, making a face that caused the children to scream.
His daughter, Morning Star, stood at the front of the line, playing the role of Mother. She was Two Wolf’s first wife and Poe-paya’s only child, and as Poe-paya reached out and tried to grab them, Morning Star would move to her left or right, trying to protect her children, the boys and girls swinging in behind her. If the Bear caught you, you were eaten: this meant being held to the ground by Poe-paya and tickled until you squealed. The point was to sprint past the Bear and steal a handful of his sugar, and the game went on until all the children were eaten or Wasape’s sugar was gone.
Levi loved Wasape. It was his favourite thing that happened.
When he badly behaves, Poe-paya doesn’t beat Levi but instead threatens him with the Comanche bogeyman, the “Mother Owl,” the Cannibal Pia Mupitsi. “Cry too loud, Mupitsi will eat you. Complain too much, Mupitsi will eat you.” “Disobedient children, children who made trouble for their parents, were taken by Mupitsi, thrown into the basket and impaled.” When Levi slyly tries to cross-examine Poe-paya about Mupitsi one night, the response has a dry humour:
“I do not enjoy these questions,” the old man told him. Neither does Mupitsi.”
Levi’s relationships deepen with Poe-paya and the childless Morning Star, but he remains an unsolved problem from the perspective of the band at large. The Comanche are and are not his people. The band fosters him, but no promises are made. The only real love and the only real obligations that arise are personal, not communal.
Two Wolf is content to let Levi remain as an anomaly, but the sinister Turns In Sunlight has an unsettled score with Two Wolf. The dying Poe-paya makes Levi promise that he will take Morning Star away from the band before Turns In Sunlight has a chance to kill them both, but Levi hesitates Hamlet-like. Turns in Sunlight conducts the anticipated coup, and, with it, a brutal purge of Two Wolf’s supporters. Levi escapes alone, but calls the Cannibal Mupitsi into himself and embarks on a campaign of revenge.
This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable: the orphan is driven off to seek his fortune; the sacred promise that is made and broken; a demonic force that, for the price of your soul, grants you the power to destroy what you hate, but not to save what you love.
As a prose stylist, Gwyn offers keen and consistent pleasure: his distinctive syntax, by evoking dialect and tone, develops the characters and world of the book implicitly and unobtrusively. Artistic prose (a very different thing from poetic prose) has never been common and is incredibly scarce these days; there is not only artistry in Gwyn’s prose, but subtlety and sophistication of artistry.
The Cannibal Owl belongs to a rich tradition of literary frontier fiction, such as Stegner’s Genesis or Faulkner’s The Bear, and it merits comparison with Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams. Both The Cannibal Owl and Train Dreams explore pain and regret within a frontier setting; both take cognizance of the injustices and barbarities of the period; both are written in rich, serious prose; and both involve the entanglement of a pioneer child with Native American demonology. Yet the books are also little alike. Train Dreams is dreamy, cerebral, and disconnected; The Cannibal Owl is gripping, visceral, and cinematic.
The Cannibal Owl is a book that unsettles the reader by affirming that human life, on both material and spiritual planes, is not only meaningful but consequential—and we might not like those consequences. In the epilogue, Levi is an old man with “the forgetting disease,” on the brink of death after a long life granted to him by God “as an affliction.” His prayers have been granted; he has done terrible things. Around him are his descendants “waiting for something, their faces frozen in expectation.” “What was her name?” he wonders, and it isn’t clear if he is thinking of his long-lost mother, or the Mother Owl, Mupitsi, whose cannibal embrace he awaits.
Daniel Cowper is a writer from a small island off the west coast of Canada, where he lives with his wife and two sons. He is the author of a book of poetry, Grotesque Tenderness, and a novel in verse, Kingdom of the Clock, forthcoming April 2025.
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
