Nocturnal chills: 'Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology' delivers an eerie collection of tales

Oct. 17—After a blistering summer, by now there's probably a note of chill in the morning air.

And recently arrived are opportunities for eerie nocturnal chills for readers of a new story collection "Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology."

A handful of the book's 26 contributors have ties to New Mexico.

One is Rebecca Roanhorse, a well-known science fiction and fantasy writer of pueblo descent who lives in northern New Mexico.

Roanhorse's contribution to the anthology is "White Hills." Its central character is Marissa, who recalls early poverty, of sleeping with three siblings in a queen-sized bed in small-town Texas.

She's now an adult and has married up. The narrative describes Marissa's life surrounded by expensive, material things that are name-dropped for emphasis in the story. "She adjusts her Gucci sunglasses ..." " ... her bright pink Manolo Blahniks tapping across the marble entry." "Her thighs sticking to the leather of her Lacoste skirt."

One evening Marissa's husband Andrew calls to say he's out at the club with the boys, and not to stay up. Home alone, Marissa decides she can't wait to tell Andrew the good news that she's pregnant.

She goes to the club, the country club. Her presence can't compete for attention with the televised pro football game Andrew is watching with his Anglo buddies. Marissa hears an apparent reference to the Washington Commanders, formerly the Redskins. Reacting to it Marissa loudly blurts out, "I'm part Native American and those mascots have never bothered me."

With that comment a harshness and gloom settle over their family dynamics. Enter her mother-in-law Elayne, who takes Marissa to "a baby specialist" and while waiting, she insists Marissa drink a smoothie that causes Marissa to vomit. Smoothie it probably isn't. Probably an emetic. The scene reveals a sinister Elayne who won't abide having a daughter-in-law, and especially not a grandchild, with Native blood. Marissa fights back.

Another story contributor with New Mexico ties is Brandon Hobson, who is Cherokee. He's an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University. His story is titled "The Ones Who Killed Us."

It seems to be set in Eastern Oklahoma, perhaps in or near the town of Tenkiller. The place and time are hinted at. From the get-go, the story graphically swirls with ghostly memories of Indians fighting and killing soldiers, and soldiers killing Indians, mostly told from the Indians' perspective. This is how the story opens: "We saw the ones who killed us, risen from deep in the cold earth with the mud and the worms, heading north across the town square ..." leading to a river, the place where the Indian women disappeared.

A forbidding grayness of death and blood permeates the air, the river and the killing ground. Hobson's narrative is fluid and jammed with images, but slowed by many sentences of Faulknerian-length.

Occasionally, he injects unfamiliar adjectives. They should give some readers pause and pay attention to them as if they are students in Hobson's class. Example: "... melding in a cool and anechoic manner that led us to a light on the side of the barn ..." Anechoic? Characterized by few or no echoes.

Another example: "... like the fulvous eyes of a wolf ..." Fulvous? Defined as orange-brown or maybe reddish-yellow. But conveying horror in this context.

Hobson's novel "Where the Dead Sit Talking" was a finalist for the National Book Award.

He is one of a group of contributors to the anthology who teach or who have taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Among the others are Tommy Orange, Kelli Jo Ford and Morgan Talty.

In his foreword to the anthology, Stephen Graham Jones writes that, as one might expect, there's stuff inside that's scary. "But there's hope, too," he advises. "Just — some nights you have to wade through a lot of blood to get there."

The volume's two editors, Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., also wrote stories that are in the collection.