[In the following review, Warrior argues that while retaining many aspects characteristic of Vizenor's previous work, Dead Voices is more mature and confident.]

Gerald Vizenor's new novel is an ideal followup to his Heirs of Columbus (1991) and other recent books. Dead Voices tells a ceremonial story of urban dwellers who play a tribal card game in which they become various animals, objects, and insects who face various urban challenges and dysfunctions. The elusive and allusive guide through the game is Bagese, a scatological urban trickster who has become a bear. Through this tribal card game, Vizenor's urban characters become fleas who fight against an exterminator ready to spray them into oblivion, squirrels chased by a heartless hunter who comes to be haunted by his wanton killing, praying mantises who raid a fruit truck, and others. Throughout, various bears lurk behind and in front of the text.

Though many of these eccentric themes will be familiar to readers of Vizenor's work, much here is innovative. Perhaps most important, Vizenor writes here with more of a sense of mature and consistent calm than in any of his earlier work. His usual aggressiveness remains, but the overall tone is one of full and rich confidence. This is most evident in the way that each chapter begins with the same evocative litany, giving a ceremonial aspect to the stories that follow. This new form allows Vizenor to present a rich and various description of his environs. The city he describes and the people and animals that inhabit it come across as desperately hollow, with their faint whispers of hope and healing ringing into the night. Throughout, the great enforcers of the hollow darkness are the "wordies," those who would ossify tribal stories and human existence into predictable patterns and banal behaviors.

Along with exploring the tragically mundane contours of contemporary existence and the power of stories in overcoming that, Dead Voices also travels along the edges of the question of whether or not stories, when recorded on the page, can retain their healing power. Vizenor, finally, hopes they do, even if he shares the reservations of Bagese that writing down the secrets of tribal games might devalue them of their liberative potential.