Written in 2007 by Drew Hayden Taylor, The Night Wanderer is an adaptation of his 1992 play A Contemporary Gothic Indian Vampire Story. As Taylor’s debut novel, The Night Wanderer is his first foray into young adult fiction. The story reflects his own Ojibwe heritage and his interests in representing the broader world through an Indigenous perspective. It was adapted into a graphic novel in 2013 by Alison Kooistra and has remained popular since its original publication. The Night Wanderer is a contemporary Gothic novel that focuses primarily on two characters: Tiffany, a 16-year-old Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) girl who lives on the Otter Lake First Nations reserve, and Pierre, an Anishinaabe vampire who is returning to the reserve for the first time in hundreds of years. As Tiffany struggles to survive a broken family and the everyday difficulties of being an Indigenous teen, Pierre struggles to fight his vampiric hunger and reconnect with the boy he once was by returning to his homeland.

This study guide refers to the 2023 Annick Press paperback.

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain descriptions of depression and references to suicidal ideation and suicide.

Plot Summary

An Anishinaabe (spelled Anishinabe in the novel) vampire named Pierre L’Errant flies to Canada for the first time in centuries. He has carefully planned his trip to avoid the sunlight, which is lethal to him. He has been avoiding the trip largely because he is ashamed to return to his homeland as a monster. Pierre lands in Canada but cannot rent a car immediately, so he lingers in the airport. When a pickpocket tries to take his wallet, he breaks two of the man’s fingers.

Meanwhile, Tiffany Hunter, a 16-year-old Anishinaabe girl, is struggling with her upturned life after her mother’s departure with another man almost a year ago. Tiffany now lives with her father, Keith, and her grandmother, Granny Ruth. She can handle daily issues like uncomfortable shoes only because she is happy in her new relationship with Tony Banks, a white boy who goes to her school. She met Tony in the library and gave him a weekah root to help with a persistent cough, and they soon began dating. At the beginning of their relationship, he began to do all of his shopping with her in order to use her Indigenous status card to avoid paying the usual tax. Now, she happily recollects how he stopped doing so when she asked him to after he used it to buy her and his mother expensive bracelets.

After a date, Tiffany returns home to find a note telling her to move to the basement for no apparent reason. She refuses, and when her father returns home, he gets into an altercation with her and reveals that he has rented the room to a visitor to help the family financially. Tiffany reluctantly cooperates.

The next day, Tiffany leaves to attend a school party with Tony, skipping an outing with her friends Darla and Kim. She and Tony pass Pierre’s unfamiliar Camry on their way out of the reserve. The Camry has a ripple effect across the entire community; an old man witnesses it and begins to feel afraid, and Tiffany’s cousin Trish has an encounter with the occupant and represses the memory entirely.

Pierre arrives at the Hunter house as their new tenant. He is welcomed by Granny Ruth, and both she and Keith are startled to see that he looks Indigenous. Pierre asks to be in the basement to avoid being near the window in Tiffany’s bedroom. After moving in, he crawls through the tiny basement window and goes on a hunt through the forest, remembering his childhood as an Anishinaabe boy named Owl.

At the party, Tony ignores Tiffany and leaves her by the car. She is the only person from the reserve at the party, which makes her feel self-conscious; she is further irritated when a girl named Julie arrives and kisses Tony’s cheeks.

Pierre’s wandering disturbs other residents. He nearly loses control of his bloodlust and hunts a man named James Jack, and then he climbs down a tree and shocks an old woman named Rachel Stoney, causing her to have a fatal heart attack. Early the next morning, he returns just as Keith leaves to go hunting, and the two bond over similar memories of pouring maple syrup on snow. Keith tells Pierre about his ex-wife, Claudia, and relives the memory of her departure. When Keith returns later in the day, there has been a power outage; he goes to get batteries from Tiffany’s room and finds a progress report that shows grades of almost all Fs.

Tiffany’s friends, Darla and Kim, point out that Julie has a gold bracelet that matches Tiffany’s silver one. Knowing Tony was supposed to give this to his mother, she calls him to confront him, but he brushes her off. Furious, Tiffany walks home. As she stands by the lake, Pierre’s voice scares her and compels her to flee halfway into the water; he apologizes and shows her the arrowheads that he found, then spookily pivots to the forest and tells her that a pheasant died in the woods. Tiffany runs home.

That night, two miscreants from Otter Lake, Dale and Chucky, try to assault Pierre, but he torments them with his glowing eyes and mysterious appearances and disappearances. He dumps them on an island in the lake in a patch of poison ivy.

Tiffany and Keith fight about her progress report, and when Keith grounds her, she sneaks out the window to go out with Tony. Pierre watches her go and remembers his childhood as Owl; when he was young, hundreds of years ago, he snuck away with French fur traders, traveling all the way to Montreal and then to France. He was extremely lonely in France, however, except for his friendship with a kind French servant girl named Anne. After he contracted measles, a vampire came to see him as he died and transformed him into a vampire; as a result, Pierre fed on Anne’s blood and killed her. In the present, Pierre is slowly losing control of himself as he starves. He is trying to perform various ceremonies before this happens.

Tony reveals that he dislikes the racial pressures of going out with Tiffany and tries to deny that he has been seeing Julie on the sly. Furious, Tiffany throws a plate of fries through his car window and rips the weekah root off his neck, then walks back home. Tiffany sneaks back into her room and realizes that her father has noticed her absence. Distraught, she calls her mother, Claudia, who reveals that she is expecting a baby with her white boyfriend. Tiffany hangs up on her mother. The next morning, Keith and Tiffany fight about Claudia’s departure, and Tiffany defends her mother’s choices. After the fight, Tiffany goes into the forest, threatening suicide.

Twelve hours pass, and Tiffany is still missing. Pierre learns about this from Granny Ruth. He leaves to search for Tiffany and finds her in a treehouse, but he must wait until his bloodlust subsides before he can confront her. Meanwhile, Tiffany is contemplating the false dilemma of enduring a hopeless future or bringing about her own death. Pierre coldly berates her for her selfish behavior. She pushes him out of the treehouse and runs to the lake.

Pierre catches her at the lake. He eventually shows her arrowheads and guides her through the history of the lake, revealing that the village from his childhood was once there. He tells her a “story” about an Anishinaabe vampire—his own story—which excites her. After she accuses him of not really caring whether she dies or not, he grabs her and offers to kill her. This terrifies her, and she realizes that she wants to live. She runs away from him but hurts herself. Pierre carries her home and tells her that her pain will pass. She gets ready for bed; Pierre returns to the lakeside, burns tobacco and sage, and greets the sunrise and his own death.