From “wendigos” to “Indian burial grounds,” the folklore and tragic history of North America’s indigenous populations has frequently been mined for inspiration and twisted to suit the purposes of horror authors writing outside of their own cultures. In recent years, however, we’ve seen a real rise in the number of indigenous voices within the horror scene telling their own stories. A new collection of short horror stories celebrates this surge of Native American writers: Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. This anthology, which contains twenty-six stories plus a foreword by Stephen Graham Jones, came out just last week, in plenty of time for spooky season.
The title of this anthology, Never Whistle at Night, refers to a belief common to many indigenous cultures that whistling at night can draw malevolent entities to you. Though this particular action is barely featured in any of the stories contained in the collection, it is a fitting and evocative title that encapsulates both the unsettling atmosphere these stories create and their distinctly Native nature. Stephen Graham Jones also does an excellent job of tying the many disparate stories of this collection together with his foreword. Jones is one of the most prominent voices in indigenous horror right now (you may recognize him from The Only Good Indians and My Heart is a Chainsaw), and I couldn’t possibly think of a better choice to introduce this collection. Jones uses his foreword to discuss the particularities of indigenous storytelling, speculating about why many Native writers and storytellers resonate with stories that are inconclusive and open-ended. Ultimately, Jones finds hope in this sort of horror, which creates the feeling that the world is bigger than what we can currently see or understand. What follows this introduction are twenty-six stories that differ significantly in subject and style, written by authors that range from big names in genre fiction like Rebecca Roanhorse and Darcie Little Badger to much lesser known writers who may have only published a few short stories before. Most of the stories are quite short, with some almost feeling more like sketches or vignettes, but together they demonstrate the impressive breadth and depth of indigenous horror.
As you might expect to find in a collection like this one, there are several stories that feature creatures from indigenous folklore. The very first story in the book introduced me to one such creature I’d never heard of before and wound up being one of my favorite tales in the collection. In “Kushtuka” by Mathilda Zeller, a young woman named Tapeesa tells the wealthy white man in her remote Alaskan village about the legend of the kushtuka—a creature that takes on the appearance of loved ones to try to lure you into following. However, the kushtuka that ultimately appears in this story doesn’t follow the traditional formula. Instead, the lines between the creature and the young woman blur as the kushtuka takes vengeance on the outsiders preying upon the Native community. Two other stories in this collection play with the best-known (but often misrepresented) creature from Indigenous folklore, the wendigo. Legends of this creature appear in the folklore of many different Algonquian-speaking tribes, and the specifics can vary as widely as the spelling and pronunciation of its name. Sometimes the wendigo is an evil spirit that haunts the frozen wilderness, sometimes it is a creature that was once human but became corrupted, perhaps by engaging in cannibalism. But the undercurrent of all these different legends is an insatiable hunger that drives the wendigo to prey upon the living. This aspect is examined in depth in Phoenix Boudreaux’s fittingly titled tale “Hunger,” which is told from the perspective of an invisible, formless entity that experiences the world through an intense, all-consuming hunger. The entity possesses a young man at a frat party, feeding off of his equally destructive appetites. The wendigo is referenced more abstractly in “Collections” by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala, which also takes place in a college setting. In this story, a scholarship student named Megis is alarmed to discover that one of her professors has decorated her home with human heads of all different ethnicities and backgrounds. None of the white students are bothered by the collection, but Megis sees it for what it is—an expression of Professor Smith’s destructive hunger for ownership over the lives of others. In each of these stories, the wendigo is not some antlered, man-eating monster as it is typically depicted in popular culture, but rather a vehicle through which to explore the unhealthy appetites that people give into when they crave ownership over or the destruction of others.
But indigenous authors aren’t just limited to writing about creatures from their own cultures. Quite a few of the stories in this collection put a new indigenous spin on classic monsters from the horror genre. “Night Moves” by Andrea L. Rogers, for example, is a fairly straightforward story of a werewolf encounter experienced by a Native soldier stationed in Germany. Morgan Talty’s “The Prepper” uses zombie apocalypse narratives to explore mental illness. And Darcie Little Badger uses the classic format of friends gathering to tell ghost stories in “The Scientist’s Horror Story” to examine the frightened, helpless feelings we may face when confronting climate change and systemic discrimination. Though these three tales feature classic monsters in some sense, the true monster that haunts this whole collection is the history of colonization and its lasting legacy that continues to impact how indigenous communities live today.
If you’re interested in the increased representation of marginalized voices in horror fiction—or if you just want an excellent collection of varied tales that run the gamut from vengeful to wistful to hopeful—I highly recommend checking out Never Whistle at Night. You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, let me know your favorite story from the collection in the comments below!