Never Whistle in The Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology / edited byShane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. / 2023

Never Whistle in The Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology / edited byShane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. / 2023

I admittedly came into this anthology hoping for Stephen Graham Jones level fiction. His forward is better than most of the short stories in this uneven collection. The best stories are "The Ones Who Killed Us" by Brandon Hobson, "Sundays" by David H. W. W. , "Hunger" by Pheonix Boudreau, and "The Preppers" by Morgan Talty. At its worst, descriptions of blatant racist mistreatment attempts to pass off for horror and plot holes defeat the illusion or allure of the stories. A few even engage in a sort of stereotyping misrepresentation of their own spiritual cultures to create horror in a way that only feels inches away from a cursed native burial ground trope, something I hoped this book would save readers from. I'm surprised there's no skinwalkers mentioned. I know there might be a taboo going on here, but the Paiutes I knew could joke about skinwalkers on microphones at pow wows, so I expected horror stories to be okay. "Sundays" confronts the child sexual abuse in boarding schools with a careful, brutal story of one man's attempt at vengeance. "The Prepper" puts us in the head of an incarcerated man who narrates the intergenerational trauma, mental illness and delusion that lead him on a killing spree. "Hunger" perhaps fails in that it reduces the predatory nature of a white frat boy trope to a sort of demonic possession. The protagonist is saved by a deus ex machina essentially and it was disappointing the way a surprising amount of the these authors relied on this move. That said, it was so captivating I didn't even mind much. I expected better from Rebecca Roanhorse and Tommy Orange, but their stories were competently written. 3/5