Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

“Marissa hops off the exam table and moves closer. She sees now the drawings are diagrams. Human heads being measured and annotated, their features grossly exaggerated.”

As Marissa waits in the exam room Elayne brings her to, the danger she and her baby face is foreshadowed by the diagrams on the wall. These diagrams show measurements of heads (a mainstay of the pseudoscience of phrenology) and stereotypical depictions of different peoples. This reflects an outdated and racist eugenics-centered approach to human biology. The diagrams seek to define character by physical features alone.

“I fumbled around the boulders at the base of the pier before I found what Cam had hidden up his sleeve: glimmering in the low light, sticking out from the seam of a few smaller rocks. An old pair of needle-nose pliers.”

Joe feels increasingly suspicious of Cam as Cam invades Joe’s apartment and obsesses over his tooth collection. In the climax, Joe fights Cam when it becomes clear that Cam possesses human teeth. As Joe walks away, he sees that Cam brought pliers to pull teeth from Joe. Cam is possessive and the pliers demonstrate how Cam sees Joe, his home, and his teeth as things he is entitled to.

“The foster mother folded her hands in her lap, lips scrunched and eyes squinted. I could almost hear her thinking, Wait until we get home, as the minister preached forgiveness.”

As the foster mother grows angry toward Punk for his behavior in church, the narrator of “Wingless” reflects on the contrast between what the foster mother thinks and what the minister says. The contrast represents the cycle of abuse that Indigenous children often endure in foster care or at residential schools, where violence and racist ideology are masked by religious sentiment.

“Knowing now that the something could grow into anything, she took the dream catcher from over Gray’s crib and hung it above Sammy’s head.”

In this excerpt from “Quantum,” Amber evaluates her understanding of Indigenous identity and accepts Sammy as her son despite him not having as much Indigenous blood as his brother. Earlier in the story, she and Dave only placed a dream catcher over Gray’s crib, making it a symbol of Amber’s love and acceptance. After spoiling Gray, Amber now relents, realizing that she can and should raise Sammy as she wants.

“They attend a university where they share ideas and learn to be the best Other People they can be. Their dreams are filled with a greed almost as endless as its own hunger.”

The Wehtigo in “Hunger” hunts on a college campus. When it finds victims in a fraternity, it reflects on how their culture and education work in tandem to perpetuate the destruction of the world the Wehtigo once knew. The Wehtigo watches as the “Other People” (white colonists) destroy Indigenous societies and culture over time and understands how universities reinforce a colonialist culture of greed and entitlement. This reflects the theme of The Intersection of Tradition and Modernity, suggesting that the modern education system reinforces the erasure of tradition.

“Except for the Quarter. That was melting like a wedding cake under an August haze. Intricate and fancy, but really just out to give you plain old diabetes and offering the flies somewhere festive to fuck.”

In “Tick Talk,” Cherie Dimaline uses figurative language not only to describe New Orleans but also to demonstrate Son’s experience in it. The simile compares the French Quarter, renowned for its nightlife, to a wedding cake that appears pretty but has a sinister underside. Similarly, Son understands the draw of the Quarter but knows it can be detrimental.

“‘This thing is like a thousand years old, I think it will be fine.’ Adam turned around and started scratching at the edges of a glyph that looked to be a turkey.”

The conflict in “Snakes Are Born in the Dark” begins when Adam destroys the petroglyphs Peter shows to him and Maddie. Adam treats the petroglyphs with carelessness and disrespect, insisting that they will be fine. Peter’s criticism of Adam’s disregard for Indigenous culture and his defense of the petroglyphs reflect resistance against cultural destruction.

“Further back, before all the hurt and the pain weighed her down. Back to when the entirety of her world was warm and peaceful. She felt that warmth embrace her and she smiled a blood-flecked smile. ‘There there.’ A voice, soft and husky in her ear. ‘Mother will take good care of you. It’s all over now.’”

In “Before I Go,” Norris Black uses Keira’s death and the Night Mother to draw a comparison between birth and death. As Keira dies, she thinks back to a time early in her life when she was carefree and knew love and warmth. Then the Night Mother welcomes her, embracing and comforting Keira as though Keira were a newborn.

“The house was breathing: the wallpaper shifted redpink in the soft light of her lantern. The curlicues on the pattern glistened and moved in a wet rhythm, becoming organs producing life, carrying blood and oxygen through the digestive system of the house.”

The house that haunts Cece comes to life, which this passage describes with imagery depicting the house as organic, with blood and a pulse. This transformation reframes Cece’s world, trapping her inside a house with the agency to haunt her. Figuratively, this suggests Cece’s haunting by the past. The house is from a different time and was once owned by different people; when it comes to life, so too do old grievances.

“Another whistle rings, this time unnaturally high. My spine is an icicle, my heart a raging engine.”

“Behind Colin’s Eyes” uses figurative language to amplify an unsettling situation. The whistle Colin hears terrifies him, and the metaphors describing his spine and heart showcase his body’s conflicting reactions. His spine is a cold and rigid object that locks him in place, a reflection of the fear his mind feels. His heart, meanwhile, is compared to a raging engine, demonstrating how his body senses danger and his nerves heighten.

“He looked back out at the field, shaking his head like there was something he was trying to figure out and couldn’t. I kept on yelling. But he’d called me the boy’s uncle. I heard it, and there was no taking it back.”

In “Heart-Shaped Clock,” Joseph deals with the trauma of being separated from his brother as well as a lack of love from his mother. She clearly favors Joseph’s brother, and this in many ways amplifies his feeling of not belonging in the family. When Joseph’s brother refers to Joseph as his son’s uncle, Joseph is ecstatic and heals a small bit of the trauma he carries.

“On her couch were two small somethings wrapped in two twisted black garbage bags covered with two blue baby blankets […] Like whatever these things were were unthawing and remembering that they were alive, kind of.”

While much of the terror in the stories of Never Whistle at Night comes from scenes of gore, suspense, or supernatural elements, “Scariest. Story. Ever” relies on the unknown to create an atmosphere of horror. By not revealing what is in the bags, author Richard Van Camp creates suspense for readers by forcing both them and Uncle Mike to imagine what might be in them. Knowing that Irena lost two children, Mike thinks that the child-sized bags contain them. However, the story does not definitively reveal their contents, amplifying the horror by maintaining suspense.

“Especially after all these white people and other ones who are backward without culture arrived here, our own relatives, other Natives, they lost their sight. Some, they don’t want nothing to do with getting it back, either.”

Intergenerational Trauma as the Legacy of Colonization is one of the primary themes of the story “Human Eaters.” In this excerpt, the protagonist explains how the loss of “sight” is a product of colonization and the erosion of Indigenous cultures and beliefs. This danger that colonialism poses to Indigenous peoples is further explored through the notion of “sight,” as the protagonist explains that people with no sight—i.e., no understanding of Indigenous beliefs—are at a higher risk from the human eaters.

“Do any of us exist, after all, unless or until we’re called to do so? Are we really alive if someone isn’t dreaming us into existence? We’re all of us one dimension removed, one silent plane away from someone else’s reality, waiting to be conjured up.”

In the story’s final paragraph, the narrator of “Longest Street in the World” addresses the reader directly and even identifies with them, using the first-person plural (“we”/“us”). This breaking of the fourth wall emphasizes the philosophical questions in the excerpt above by engaging readers in a new way—“calling them into existence” in the way the passage describes.

“I’ve noticed that when you see a good horror film, your senses open up like you’re a bug with a thousand feelers. You hear more noises, sense every breeze.”

Imagery is essential to the horror genre, which depends on the senses. This excerpt explores that principle, evaluating how horror films amplify a person’s senses, as they are more cognizant of their surroundings due to anxiety and suspense. The simile both explicates this idea and serves as an example, evoking an uncomfortable image of a bug with so many feelers it cannot fail to notice everything.

“He was trying to talk to me. Trying to clear his chest and throat like, again, a cloudy sky trying to part. When he could finally say something, my grandfather said, ‘Are you prepared?’”

Nelly in “The Prepper” compares his sick grandfather’s congestion to a congested sky. The simile evokes the gap in understanding between Nelly and his grandfather. When the latter asks Nelly if he is ready, Nelly believes he is asking about the zombie apocalypse; despite the grandfather’s efforts to “part the clouds” and speak clearly, Nelly misinterprets him.

“He never meant to be an ancestor, but it’s the only thing more unavoidable than taxes.”

“Uncle Robert Rides the Lightning” explores the deaths and afterlives of its characters, Robert and Gregory, with this short excerpt uniting the two halves of the story. In the first half, both characters are alive. The second half details what comes after death and imagines who the characters may be in the afterlife. This quote treats death as an inevitability and thus the logical next step in the characters’ narrative.

“On the drive back to Rosebud, I watched the chaos of the city and the suburbs slowly fade away as the native grasses and flowers began to appear by the side of the road […] The sky was shining and radiant, and I had a clear view of the road ahead, the horizon opening up before me.”

Thomas Bear Nose struggles throughout “Sundays” to overcome trauma from his time in a residential school. It is only at the story’s climax that he finally forgives himself and begins to move on. In the closing paragraph of the story, Thomas’s journey out of the city reflects his personal journey and hopes for the future. As he drives away, the clustered buildings and unpredictability of the city fade away to a peaceful scene, evoking memories of his wife. The road and horizon ahead of him symbolize his new future.

“I can tell you the price of my brother’s body. Cummings Chapel charged us $885 to burn our brother down to nearly nothing. We paid $79.99 for the dark blue urn we poured him into once the chapel returned him to us in crinkled plastic that reminded me of a cereal bag.”

In “Eulogy for a Brother, Resurrected,” author Carson Faust uses numbers to evoke the tragedy and horror of the protagonist’s brother’s death. Reducing an entire human life to a price tag and then to a “crinkled plastic” bag creates a sense of dissonance that underscores the depth of Della’s sense of loss.

“What they had killed had morphed into a man, the first man they had ever killed. They had trained for that, stabbed, fought, and shot sawdust dummies, but this man was real. No, he was a real man now.”

Walt volunteers to serve in Germany to avoid fighting in Vietnam. By doing so, he trains with the assurance that he will likely avoid combat. However, when he fights the werewolf, he uses his training, and though he kills the werewolf in self-defense, the werewolf’s transformation creates a new kind of horror for Walt: Now he must face the fact that he killed a man, an act he so desperately tried to avoid.

“I almost wrote my dissertation on the parallels between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the United States government creating Native people as wards of the state.”

In “Capgras,” the protagonist Tom connects historical US relations with Indigenous people to the novel Frankenstein, positioning the US government as Dr. Frankenstein. The allusion hints at the “afterlife” of Indigenous peoples within the political context of the US state. Dr. Frankenstein reanimated corpse parts to create a monster whose existence the novel frames as unnatural; similarly, the US government figuratively “resurrected” the Indigenous peoples it had subjugated but did not give them true, meaningful life.

“Similarly, ruins are extensions of the people who built and lived within their walls. And they show us what we’ll all become: the stories of everything and everyone we leave behind.”

In “The Scientist’s Horror Story,” Anders expresses his belief that ruins act as societal foreshadowing. Ruins demonstrate who a particular people once were, but they also reflect the fact that everyone and everything will eventually crumble and be nothing but a story about the past. This is reflected in Bets’s story, as she ponders the question of what humanity can do in the face of an increasingly uncertain future.

“I felt like a leaf in fall, collected and pressed between pages to preserve it. Keeping it from continuing the life cycle: breaking down and fertilizing the soil so something new can grow from it.”

Megis Cloud finds herself trapped in an uncomfortable and dangerous environment at her professor’s party. To describe this feeling, she uses a simile comparing herself to a leaf. A leaf pressed within pages is frozen in time, unable to continue growing or to nourish other plants’ growth. Megis feels similarly, uncertain about what direction she can take and worried about how her professor’s desires will impact her future.