Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., has been a fairly consistent seller at the bookstore I work at. Featuring writers whose novels I've loved in the past (Stephen Graham Jones, Tommy Orange, Rebecca Roanhorse), and authors that I've heard of but never read like Cherie Dimaline and Darcie Little Badger (and more), it seemed like something I was destined to get to eventually. When my coworker read it and offered me her copy, I asked for a recommendation for three of the stories. She gave it; I ended up reading eight total and felt good about that.
The first of the stories I read, as I'm sure a lot of people did, was the one most highly recommended to me. An author named Tom or Thomas is in France for a press junket about his newly-translated novel, which seems to be about a car crash. He's just learned about the Capgras Syndrome, where patients believe that people close to them have been replaced by an identical impostor. As his junket goes on, he's becoming more and more convinced that the translator has done more than just translate his book; after one interview,
The Swiss journalist wouldn't know that I would drink way too much alone at a bar next to the bookstore, then go to my reading and read from the Bible the whole time as a response to the overly Christian interpretation/translation of my book.Afterwards, the publisher sets up a meeting with the French translator who, after shaking Thomas' hand multiple times, admits that he's not actually the translator. In a rage, Thomas looks into a mirror and watches as Kokopelli bursts out of the knot in his shoulder that has been plaguing him the whole story.
("Capgras," Orange, 339)
The story isn't particularly subtle; the protagonist thinks actively of the fact that he's a living stereotype (as an alcoholic Native American) before a Native God sheds him like an eggshell. The titular syndrome projects what the mirror ultimately confirms, that someone has been replaced. As in his novels, Tommy Orange excels at portraying this overwhelm of the personal by history with just a touch of body horror.
There are any number of reasons to go into a book knowing you're not going to finish it. A textbook, for instance, is rarely meant to be read cover to cover. The same might be said, say, of historical tomes picked up for research purposes. The best selling book of all time, as we all know, is primarily interacted with in excerpt from the pulpit.
Short story anthologies can occupy that same space. They are often approached as a sort of sampler platter, a way to get hold of a writer's style or introduce yourself to a scene or movement. Generally speaking (especially when I read them for review), I approach them from the opposite valence. Over a decade ago, I reviewed a collection called Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction and talked about how it used the form of the collection to more thoroughly integrate the genre with historical materialism. I explicitly called it "the future of science fiction" (it is no longer available for purchase, the publisher having quietly broken up). I enjoy this act; engaging with and speculating upon the decisions of the editors, threading theme and image into something hopefully more than the sum of its parts.
Not with this book, though.
The next strongest recommendation from my coworker ("It's the weirdest one" was basically all it took) was for a story by one of the coeditors.
The dying sun flashed blood orange on the cream landau top and blazed its way along the chrome trim as the big, boxy Ford drifted by, neither its former driver nor any of her passengers currently possessed of their heads"The Longest Street in the World" is a kaleidoscopic handful of pages where a dog demon/deity relieves of their heads some white kids who threw a brick through a window, and a would-be robber gets to take the blame. As the quote demonstrates, Van Alst Jr. has a decidedly playful, elliptical way with words that I find delightful.
("The Longest Street in the World," Van Alst Jr., 228)
You might contrast that with "Tick Talk," a story my friend didn't quite militate against, but you get the idea. The story's author, Cherie Dimaline, was someone whose name I was familiar with despite never having read her work; the story as a whole is, perhaps appropriately, bloated and largely sedentary.
It's also fucking gross, which is great. A longer excerpt:
He took one last generous swig of rye and went for the knife. In his rush, his foot caught on the pile of clothes by the couch and his arms pinwheeled, looking for purchase. Before he hit the ground, his head caught the corner of the coffee table. Everything went dark.There are masterful moments and missteps here. The filmic writing—the pinwheeling arms, the owl's 'hoo'ing cutting the dream—works, as does the description (like I said, gross) of a tick the "size and shape of a lightbulb hot with [his] own blood." It is immediately visual. It is that same filmic impulse that leads to a line like "leaving the moon like a bright eye pressed to the glass," however, which kills the pace of the sequence, and which is indicative of how the story meanders to the point that it kills its own pace.
He dreamt of his father. Alexis was standing by the window in his faded red suspenders. Outside, the coyotes were howling.
"Who are they here for?" the old man asked.
"No one," Son answered, but felt a nagging guilt. "They're just here."
"No," the man shook his gray head. "They're here for someone."
Son decided to come clean. "It's you, Dad. You're dead. They're coming for you."
The man let the yellowed curtain drop and turned. "Oh, my boy. Animals don't come for those who are leaving. They come for those who are forgetting. Now then, who is it?"
It was the owl that woke him.
"Hoo. Hoo," it called.
"I don't know," Son mumbled. "I don't know."
"Hoo. Hoo," it insisted.
The dream faded like smoke. Son's head felt huge and wobbly, like a balloon filled with blood. He had to hold it, to keep it steady, so he began rubbing it with his left hand and opened his eyes, trying to focus. He saw the owl in the window just as it took flight, leaving the moon like a bright eye pressed to the glass. The moon and the bathroom light were the only illumination, so it took Son a minute to figure out the wet on his fingers from his forehead was blood.
"Oh, dammit." He struggled to sit up and felt a deep tug in his guts.
He reached down to rub at the spot, forgetting until his hand hit the smooth, warm curve of the tick's bloated body. It took a moment for him to register this thing, this growth, the size and shape of a lightbulb hot with his own blood, as a tick. He kept his hand on it, feeling down its thorax to where it connected to his stomach, a lock-and-key fit, tight as a drum.
("Tick Talk," Dimaline, 103-4)
It might not have happened had I been reading front to back, but something about the formal discontinuity struck me here. Per the book's subtitle, this is what is on offer. An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology; no claims to represent an ongoing movement, to capture a snapshot in time. This is no Mirrorpunk, as much manifesto as anthology; Stephen Graham Jones' introduction doesn't exactly channel "Chairman Bruce" Sterling. Nor is it like the aforementioned Menial, tapping largely unknown writers to use fiction to drive a political understanding into the genre.
It's also not really a survey of the field; one doesn't get the sense that this is all the Indigenous Dark Fiction on offer, nor does it make a claim to be the best. In fact, the book makes basically no claim at all, except that the writers are Native and their fiction is some form of spooky.
Take, for instance, Rebecca Roanhorse's "White Hills," the story of a social climber who becomes pregnant, accidentally reveals her native heritage and, ultimately, chooses to lose a finger rather than give up the cushy life she's achieved.
Some people don't like HOAs, but Marissa loves them. They keep the houses looking nice and the people uniform, and isn't that one of the reasons she and Andrew chose to move here?I like this story quite a bit. The characters are well-drawn, the circumstances genuine and pretty awful to comprehend. It was also by this point in the collection (nonlinearly read) that I think I subconsciously began processing the fact that none of these stories really seemed to be in conversation with each other.
("White Hills," Roanhorse, 21)
(An aside: I find Roanhorse to be one of the most intriguing worldbuilders working, and a very fine character writer. Her plots don't always hold up, to my reading, whether in Fevered Star, the middle book of the Between Earth and Sky trilogy or Tread of Angels; the former ends up feeling like a big chess game, the characters being moved without their motivations accounted for to set up the finale (which is good but doesn't super hit), the latter letting the characters kind of overwhelm the world and mystery to the point where it becomes supremely predictable. Which maybe means I should be reading way more of her short stories. She should put out a collection.)
"White Hills," for instance, is much more in conversation with the morality tales with a twist that have been maybe the dominant form of American horror since Stephen King put down his EC Comics collection and picked up a typewriter. The body horror in "Capgras" and the body horror in "Tick Talk" are widely divergent, not pointing to anything I was able to pull closer toward me.
None of which is to say that these stories don't share things. All (that I read and so can speak to, but I suspect it is true without this caveat) deal with indigeneity and the Native American experience; all (see above) deal in darkness in some way. Stephen Graham Jones, in the somewhat rambling introduction (you could call it familiar or vernacular and I wouldn't disagree; chatty, maybe?) attempts to twine them together by contrasting native and settler relationships to the land, and setting that speculative darkness up as a form of resistance.
The ultimate feel of Never Whistle at Night to me was that it was a way to put Indigenous authors in the spotlight; that the reader might find new material by previous favorites and new authors whose work to delve into. That's a mighty fine goal, and it genuinely worked for me.
Unfortunately, I already knew that I wasn't going to finish this one, and what was on offer in other books were drawing me through them more artfully, so I put it back on the shelf.
Other Books I Didn't Finish:
Moby Dyke (Krista Burton)
I made it about half an hour into the audiobook of this and, since we hadn't even touched the subject matter, bailed. Burton's lengthy introduction about how the book came together, which, yes, it did, I'm listening to it, I know it exists, if you really need to do this could we not have it as an afterword? needled at me in a number of ways. Burton's self-identification as a lesbian married to a trans man is… something. Queers have all kinds of identifications and interpersonal relations are interpersonally defined and etcetera, and the political valence of lesbianism with respect to trans political violence is maybe as fraught as it has ever been (e.g. TERFs), but I know, for me, I would have a hard time being in a relationship with a man, as a nonbinary person, who identified it as a Gay relationship (or with a woman who identified as exclusively straight). Not a huge deal, but one of those personal things.
Probably the big one was the way Burton positions Covid, at least in the part of the intro I read, as functionally over the moment the first vaccine was released. It's primed in a hugely selfish way - Burton recounts feeling isolated from lockdown but also moving to a rural community and having a midlife crisis in what you might call the Autostraddle house style (not pejorative, necessarily). Her genuinely evocative descriptions of being crushed between queer bodies at the club blithely skates over what is still an ongoing mass disabling event, and I think that sucks, in itself and because it gave a very strong impression that one of the central questions about what we do about keeping these queer spaces alive given the pandemic world we live in was likely to be blithely ignored.
Also there was just what felt like eight pages recounting how Burton was maybe going to write this book back in 2018 and missed the opportunity and now she's feeling old and was so worried and at a certain point I was like fuck it I'm just going to listen to a mediocre Sy Montgomery book on this walk instead.