Many Indigenous people believe that one should never whistle at night. This belief takes many forms: for instance, Native Hawaiians believe it summons the Hukai’po, the spirits of ancient warriors, and Native Mexicans say it calls Lechuza, a witch that can transform into an owl. But what all these legends hold in common is the certainty that whistling at night can cause evil spirits to appear—and even follow you home.
A collection of two dozen horror (and otherwise dark fiction) stories by a wide variety of indigenous authors. Three of which I’d read before:
Like any anthology there are some stories in here that I didn’t care much for–and some that really hit hard. Overall, it’s a fascinating new look (for me) into all sorts of new and interesting creepy things.
And all too often, you might just find that people are people. And people are scarier than any monster out there.
So, for these next pages, let these writers take you by the hand, lead you into the darkness at the heart of—let me put some quotation marks around it—“America.”
Reviews for individual stories (my favorites are marked with ‡):
Kushtuka by Mathilda Zeller
A variant on the ’tapping on the roof’ horror story, but with a fun bit of Inuit mythology!
“Fine. Fine.” I wracked my brain, but in the darkness, I could think of nothing bright and benign. “There was once a girl named Sedna. Her father threw her over the edge of his fishing boat. She tried to save herself by catching on to the edge of the boat, but he brought a knife down onto her fingers and cut them all off. They became the first seals, walruses, whales. She became the goddess of the Underworld.”
White Hills by Rebecca Roanhorse
Marissa doesn’t follow sports, but she knows what he’s talking about. She’s seen people complaining about “The Chop” on TikTok, read an article about Indian mascots in Vogue. She raises her voice so everyone can hear. It’s a declaration.
“I’m part Native American, and those mascots have never bothered me.”
She realizes her mistake immediately.
And then… “baby specialist”.
Yeah. Saw that one coming.
Oy.
Navajos Don’t Wear Elk Teeth by Conley Lyons
Teeth be creepy yo.
I knew most of the families on our street, of course. It was hard to be standoffish considering we were the first brown folks to own a house on the island.
And then the story pretty immediately gets super-rapey? Oy.
Super rapey. Is it any different cause they’re both men?
Grandpa gave a sharp, ugly laugh. “ ’Cause if you’re cornered, you’re desperate. And desperate men do things they might regret down the road.”
Wingless by Marcie R. Rendon
From teeth to fly wings. Cheerful.
Always interesting who is the “bad” one.
The description of butchering chickens is a bit visceral.
Quantum by Nick Medina
The whole ‘blood quantum’ thing is certainly an interesting way to draw a line. And seeing it used both externally and internally is certainly interesting.
“Yeah, well, what can you do?” Dave took a long drag and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “You know what they say about balance…that the Creator grants us the gift of choosing our parents before we’re born so that they’ll help us find balance within ourselves, ultimately allowing us to decide how we’re born and how we’ll die.”
Side note:
“It’s up to us to make sure the blood lines don’t run too thin. Remember what my mom said?”
“Only Netflix and chill on the rez. Got it,” Amber said.
Hunger by Phoenix Boudreau ‡
It is always hungry. In the time Before the Other People came, the original People’s stories about it had given it its own form. The People wouldn’t dare to say its name in the dark; they whispered its stories to one another and their reverent fear sustained it. The People had called it a spirit of evil, but it has only ever been hungry. The modern People have forgotten; Other People came and erased its stories, tried to pretend it didn’t exist. But it has always been here and always will be. It is as inevitable as the Land itself. The People forget, but it does not.
And then a hunter, hunted.
Tick Talk by Cherie Dimaline
Perfectly natural ticks are freaky enough thanks.
The Ones Who Killed Us by Brandon Hobson
The ones who killed us?
The ones who killed them.
Snakes Are Born in the Dark by D.H. Trujillo ‡
“What the hell do you want me to do? Your boyfriend is having some kind of rapid growing man-baby like that vampire baby from Twilight and you want me to do something?! Do I look like a vampire doctor to you?”
Oh my.
Well that was surreal.
Before I Go by Norris Black
The old woman regarded her with sad eyes. “You shouldn’t have come here. Your pain is stirring up things better left alone. Go home, child. Remember him, cherish him, but leave him here and live your life.”
Night in the Chrysalis by Tiffany Morris
I love the word-smithing in this one.
A new life: so came this first night in the chrysalis of the empty house. Each room contained the ghosts of future memories.
And:
Eyes were watching her in the dark but she could not see them. The streetlight moon outside sent unreal shadows into the empty room. The light itself searched the darkness for her, living prey watched by walls and windows—
Also: ‘good luck’ in a dark fiction/horror anthology… isn’t.
Also also, I never really considered how creepy snails in large numbers could be…
Behind Colin’s Eyes by Shane Hawk ‡
The wriggling, exploding organ reenters my mind, and my breathing intensifies. Feels like I’m in my own weird western tale. “Where did all the bugs go?”
Whelp.
This is definitely a ‘but what happened next?!’ sort of story.
Heart-Shaped Box by Kelli Jo Ford
When the foreman rested his hands on the walnut rail and admitted they couldn’t agree whether I was guilty of killing my baby brother, the courtroom grew tiny, quiet except for shuffling papers and the big clock ticking over my shoulder.
Odd ordering.
Scariest Story. Ever. by Richard Van Camp
Meta much? Won the in universe ‘scariest story ever awards’ and now needs something even scarier!
“ ‘Because we’re not little kids anymore and we know that it’s all just pretend. There’s no Wheetagos. There’s no Sasquatch. There’s no Devil. Aliens are just one big fib. Nothing you said is real,’ Arlis said and we looked at one another. He said what we’d come there to say and now it felt dangerous.“
“ ‘Are you sure you want to hear my scariest story?’ she asked us.
A good way to get some work done at least.
Side note: I hadn’t heard this one before of the apocryphal story about Christopher Columbus referring to the indigenous people he encountered as “Los Indios” (The Indians) as a shortened form of “una gente en Dios”, meaning “a people in God”.
Human Eaters by Royce K. Young Wolf ‡
“That’s right. No need to waste my breath on nuhn-guh-chees!” That means “no ears.” My great grandma used to call her own grandkids that. I tell them, “If you have no ears you might as well just cut them off and toss them in the fire, if you don’t want to listen.”
The beings to scare children that most people can’t even see? Let’s just make them GIANTS.
The Longest Street in the World by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.
Chicago hitched ever so slightly but breathed the same as it ever did; in the normal course of things, that honky donkey carload would never tell their grandchildren what they’d done, even as they tilted out of their caskets into the long chute down to Hell while middle-aged Marys and Josephs ate wake-scented ham salad sandwiches and caught up on their kids’ sad Little League triumphs and news of other white mediocrities. The city sighed along, settler sons and daughters telling its tale for a while, but not forever.
That’s such a description.
And then suddenly bag of heads.
That tracks, doesn’t it? 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.
Dead Owls by Mona Susan Power
I agree silently in my head. Agreeing out loud would be disrespectful. In my world older folks can say any damn thing that takes you apart, but a kid has to swallow the truth until you grow up.
Dreams.
She doesn’t ask for explanations yet. Sometimes it’s convenient being Native—we’ve got a pretty high tolerance for weirdness.
A good description of the book.
The Prepper by Morgan Talty ‡
My grandfather watched [zombie] films with me occasionally, when he felt well enough, which became rarer and rarer. Mom worried about all the gruesome images, asked my grandfather if this was okay, and he said it was. “I like it, doosis,” he said. “It’s comforting that they suffer more than me.” A laugh. His laugh. When she had gone to work, I asked if that were true, and he said “Yes.” I wondered if the movies gave him nightmares. They gave me nightmares, but I loved them. They felt like training simulations.
So of course he asks:
“There’s gotta be a word,” I said.
He thought. “If there is, I don’t know it.”
“Really?”
He thought again. Or maybe he was just trying to catch his breath. “Nὰka, maybe.”
“Nὰka?” I repeated. “What’s that?”
“The former living.”
“So it means zombie?”
“No, not in that sense.”
And then you get those times where humanity is the creepy part after all.
Uncle Robert Rides the Lightning by Kate Hart
But the burglars shoved the fridge against the door and ran out the back, taking some jewelry and some other small things with them. A few weeks later, a man strolled by, wearing the brand-new leather jacket that they’d stolen from Greg’s closet. Gregory was working roofing, and his sister called, demanding he round up his biggest friends. But there was no ass-kicking, no matter how well deserved. He already knew what was worth looking for, and what he could afford to lose.
Sundays by David Heska Wanbli Weiden ‡
And again, sometimes humanity is the worst.
So what is the argument for statute of limitations anyways?
Start with a nightmare 50 years ago rape by a priest
Statute of limitations. 3 years and no adults against boarding schools.
The next day, I looked up the meaning of wokintunze in Lakota and discovered that it meant forgiveness in the presence of the Creator.
Eulogy of a Brother, Resurrected by Carson Faust ‡
On the slab, Callum weighed one hundred and fifty-eight pounds. His skin, his jeans, his jacket, his shoes. Heart, lungs, brain, bowels, teeth—it all came to one hundred and fifty-eight pounds. All the blood left in him came to that. So how much would he have weighed if he hadn’t lost any to the ground, to the cracks in the blacktop? Either way, most of all that rose up as smoke, and now we’re left with the four pounds of him that remain.
And the real horror story?
I fell apart. I lost my job. Clay Mound Elementary offers two personal days a year to all teachers. I burned through those, hardly noticing them pass. The administration figured it was easier to replace me. You let us know if next year is more suitable. You just need to get better, they said.
Night Moves by Andrea L. Rogers
Walt waited for JohnBoy, anyway. If someone asked him why Carl could call him Chief, but a drunken white farm boy couldn’t, Walt couldn’t have explained it. When Carl said it, it was filled with an admiration for the American Indian that he had learned from his German mother and Walt could forgive that. When JohnBoy said it, it was full of the mockery of a man whose family had stolen your land.
There wolf.
Capgras by Tommy Orange ‡
Between my staggering and hunching, I must have left the plane looking like Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, Fritz, so often mistakenly thought of as Igor. In grad school, 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. Coincidentally, Mary Shelley references Native people, and has her monster weeping over what happened to Native people in America.
Man this story gets increasingly surreal…
The Scientist’s Horror Story by Darcie Little Badger
“But being a grown-up horror fan is rough. I can’t suspend disbelief anymore. It’s too easy to sniff out fiction.”
Anders’s laugh lines deepening so subtly, the change might have been a trick of shadows and candlelight. “Adults are a tougher audience than kids,” he agreed. “However, our stories can be scarier, too.”
“Prove it, Rock Man,” Harmoni challenged. “Tell us a ghost story.”
“My pleasure.” Anders raised his beer can as if toasting the challenge. “Tonight, ladies, you won’t need to suspend any disbelief, ’cause my story really happened.”
It’s actually not a bad story within a story, even if the ending is a little weak.
But that second story? The real world is horrifying enough.
Collections by Amber Blaeser-Wardzala ‡
I liked those stories. Liked the way my relatives’ faces lit up as they retold the capture of their prize. And I grew used to the glassy eyes that watched my every move. Death lived in those houses like an old friend, like she was one of us, a member of the Cloud family.
Heads on the wall. And a story for each and every one of them.
But it wasn’t too late. I could ask Professor Smith for a recommendation another day—or I could ask a different professor who didn’t have the body parts of humans on their walls. That was probably the better option.
Limbs by Waubgeshig Rice ‡
And in the end, people are (once again) the most horrifying.
The… second most horrifying?
Trees.