2026 Book Review #1 – Never Whistle At Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, ed. Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst
First finished read of the year! Which feels slightly like cheating, because I read all but 30 pages while travelling and then the remainder recovering from New Year celebrations, but anyway. I grabbed this book at a convention in the fall off the strength of one of the contributing author’s talks, and otherwise went in blind. It was an interesting read with several great stories, but painfully uneven and probably in need of a harsher editor. Still, lovely accompaniment for dark winter nights.
The title gets across the point of the book quite accurately. This is a wide-ranging anthology with almost nothing in common from story to story except an indigenous protagonist (and author) and an at least slightly spooky or bleak tone. The stories are set across the United States and Canada (about the same range that authors are drawn from), and include everything from bleak literary fiction about broken families and addiction to what feels like the pilot to a YA series about young medicine women dealing with monsters preying on a college town. The prose also varied from downright poetic to really effectively eerie to – well, one or two definitely suffer from ‘a direct line to the author’s bluesky feed’ syndrome.
Shot story collections – especially ones like this, without a real unifying style or subject matter – are always difficult to review. Twenty six different stories by twenty six different authors are difficult to summarize or draw any coherent ideas out of. Opening the book, I had assumed (a bit thoughtlessly, really) that it would be all horror stories – and they do make up the better part of it! – but the two or three pieces of more-or-less realistic literary fiction ended up being my favourites of the lot. Not necessarily because they were the best-written on a sentence-to-sentence level (there are a couple beautifully poetic fever dream horror-stories in here as well, even if I found one of them quite insufferable for other reasons), but because they tended towards rather more introspection and subtlety than the genre offerings did.
Which is to say, a lot of the book suffers from an issue endemic to a disheartening amount of buzzy horror these days; a sort of insecurity where the audience must at all points know exactly what they’re supposed to think and feel about what’s happening. Which can certainly be done more or less gracefully, but is ime very difficult to reconcile with well-done horror regardless – the need to in the final analysis either fully damn or fully redeem every character, especially. It does not always approach the ‘more graceful’ end of the spectrum here. There’s three or four stories in the book with really excellent, horrifying concepts and presentations that really struggle in the execution from this (one succeeds regardless, the others...).
Maybe it’s better to say that the anthology format doesn’t do the weaker entries any favours. There are some stories here that I liked more or less than others, but god there’s a couple that including them in the collection just feels cruel to the authors because it invites the comparisons.
The degree to which indigeneity is central to the narratives is interesting to think about, if only because it varies more than I would have expected. There are a lot of horror and ghost stories with indigenous protagonists, and while some are very much Indigenous Horror in the clear and direct way you’d expect, others are so only subtextually (the one about the guy who’s shitty, possessive summer boyfriend turns out to be a serial killer who takes teeth as trophies) or peripherally (the one that’s mostly a ghost story about grief and suicide in a hospital). As a rule I tend to treasure subtext and a pathological refusal to directly explain one’s themes on the page for the audience’s benefit, so those did tend to be what I preferred, but the actual quality of prose was an entirely different distribution that prevented that from being an easy rule.
Short stories are just hard, especially ones trying to do something even mildly original in the area of horror; hard to blame authors who have never been published in the genre before for not pulling it off. Still, there’s two or three authors from this book I immediately looked up other works of to put on my list, and several more than that I sincerely doubt I’ll ever read again. Which might just be the anthology experience in general.
