Had to continue with
'Never Whistle at Night, Part II: Back for Blood' (August 2026), still edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.. This time, I didn't have to zoom through the book since it was a full 21-day loan instead of a Skip-The-Line seven days.
We have 21 stories written by Indigenous authors. As it is with the first book, these are in the genre of dark fiction and psychological horror touching on themes of colonialism, exploitation, rape and plunder. People lived through horrors and survived to tell them. We should be celebrating diversity and acceptance and not ostracization.
It was a terrible world back then, and now, it's insidious. Whenever I read the news versus books, I can't seem to differentiate what is reality anymore. The reality reported by the news outlets are worse than what the books say. With this second book of this collection, by this point, I felt like I was watching a television series. LOL It could, technically be a limited series with 8-10 episodes.
There were also illustrations by Cheyenne-Arapaho artist Brent Learned. I don't know if the hard copies hold illustrations in color. In this digital book, I could only see them in a black-and-white square at the start of each story. Here're five stories I'm highlighting from the collection:
'Neon Moon' by Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.Had to feature one by an editor, surely? A Native American teenager Joey was just hanging out with his boys when they were stalked by a creature that people named Mothman. The monster killed his friends Jimmy and Tommy. Joey fled through the alleys of Chicago, the last boy standing. He didn't last long.
The Mothman is a creation of the Department of Urban Anomalies (DUA). It used to be human before it became this creature with wings. It understood only tasks to fulfil and killing to be done. It was left with very little empathy or even full understanding of human emotions. It had no mercy.
On occasion he'd remember who he was before the government's experiments turned him into what he was now, brought to life to hunt down the last of the Indians and anyone associated with them. Ironically, the Americans who made him had based him on an Indian legend, twisting the Animikii, the Thunderbird, into something guaranteed to scare the shit out of them, maybe even make them obey in advance or give in prematurely. Then added scalpings, murder, and mayhem to make their point.
Their final solution, Relocation in the '50s and '60s, hadn't worked, had backfired, actually, the power of the American Indian Movement rising from the rubble of the cities they'd talked them into moving to. All their programs of destruction over the years had failed. This was their Hail Mary.
'Civilized' by A.J. EversoleIn Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1920, we follow Charley Redbird, a 'passing' Cherokee man (he looks white, along with his blue eyes) who discovers the hidden bodies of Native and Freedwomen one after another. And we see how the authorities deal with him and the situation as he reports each discovery.
The term 'passing' is a racially-charged concept in those years. Racial passing meant that individuals often concealed their Indigenous ancestry to escape severe social prejudice, forced assimilation, economic exclusion, or the threat of having children taken.
He was passing on moonshine to his cousin Jimmy and his new black girlfriend Joannie Taylor. They figured that he was least likely to be searched by the white marshals because of his looks and blue eyes. On one of these runs, he found Joannie's body in an alley, strangled. He found a pair of marshals and told them. They didn't bother with his name. They waved him home and they said they would sort it out.
This weighed on his mind. He felt that he should have pushed for justice, or request to open an investigation. He couldn't sleep.
Charley took a deep breath; how could he explain to his mother that he had a feeling that the marshals weren't doing their due diligence? They had even wanted his name.
He didn't know how he could tell his mother that his own white skin, something that neither he nor she had control over, was what had him shaking so badly. He knew without a doubt that it let him walk away from a murder scene tonight. He didn't know how to say it, so he didn't.
Then a month later, Charley found a second body in the woods. It was a girl with torn skirts, bound hands, and stabbed to death. He reported it to the marshals office. He asked if he would need to be further questioned or have his statement taken. The marshals told him to go home.
Charley realized that with his looks and the prejudice the marshals had against the Indians, people like him, "apparently was able to get away with anything on a scale from bootlegging to murder. What a fucking escalation."
When he found the body of Ruth Sixkiller on the road just down from his house, he crumbled. The marshals kinda assumed he did it. But still the marshals let him go and didn't pursue it. They told him to go home. His mother told him to get home. So he did.
'Rez Dogs' Stephen Graham Jones This was an absolute hoot. Dogs are always better than humans. Animals and wildlife always are. But this tale reminds us that sometimes, the lines are blurred. Often, humans are manipulative and outright evil. Different skins, different behavior, it seems.
Winter is a tough time for this band feral shapeshifting dogs. Food is scarce, and a warm bed is unheard of. They do eat like dogs, and the leftovers tossed out by humans and such. They took the deer skull and legs from a few hunters who weren't supposed to be hunting deer. A simple enough life and straightforward desires.
Then we see that these feral dogs, when they're fed and full, in the night, they became humans.
When they're humans, they don't seem to be very nice. They're rowdy and juvenile. Hanging out together, they flipped beer bottles, and began flipping them onto oncoming cars. They got one squarely, and it went off the road and into the ditch, turning turtle. Then the humans whoopped.
... ... and the rest of them fall in, whopping with him while they tear the people skin off their chests, peel out of it so the dogs they really are can step out, howl and howl like they want to, never mind the family of five dead in the snow up there, coming back from shopping in Great Falls, their trunk so full of groceries.
'The Corpse Room' by Debra Magpie Earling Religion isn't the be-all and safe haven. Haven't colonialists used religion to subvert the current population to bring about control? It's historically accurate and it isn't just a nice form of evangelism.
This story might be the most difficult to read in the entire book. I didn't like it at all, but I wasn't offended by it. However, this story will be offensive to some. It re-imagines the Virgin Mary in a story where Catholic priests and nuns abusing Indigenous children are the real monsters.
Montana in 1959 isn't a nice place. Room 366 in a mission boarding school in Saint Ignatius is known as the Corpse Room because that is where the dead are stored. The nuns "not-so-secretly nicknamed it 666". Nuns at the mission boarding school regularly lock Indian girls in the Corpse Room. Father Unger was cruel to the girls and didn't allow them to speak their Native languages. He also did unspeakable things to the girls in the Corpse Room, in the name of 'punishment'. The girls were knocked out by ether and they couldn't fight back.
Unger was worse than Goatman come to warn us. Worse than the devil come to take us. Worse than nuns aborting babies or girls disappearing.
Koochee McDonald was a rebel. She was caught in a compromising position with a young man, got punished and locked into a supply closet. Then she went missing. The next day, the girls were all hauled into the Corpse Room with the Koochee's corpse propped up in the corner. Father Unger, Mother Superior and the Sisters came in. The girls were told that Koochee had requested for the girls to be released from this mission boarding school and sent home. Then the dead Koochee returned, bringing vengeance upon all who had wronged her.
We saw her. We all saw her. A monstrous woman, brown-skinned and wide-hipped. We couldn't take her all in, but she was all-encompassing. Her animal smile, her nipping coyote teeth. Her brown breasts were pendulous, plump as a mother bear spilling milk, her areolas dark as Indian licorice. A smell rose in the room, unfathomable, so sweet the scent of wild roses and powder-blue huckleberries flooded our senses. We were drawn into her wolf-deep sniff. Her flapping eagle arms. She eclipsed the windows with her orgasmic enormity. She lit the whole wide room. We smelled her cleansing breath of sweetgrass and sage.
We were overcome.
'The Making of Monsters' by Kimberly BlaeserThe last story in the collection is told through the eyes of teenaged narrator Namid. His tribe is facing a tribulation of sorts by these monsters Mishibizhii (an underwater panther, a manitou), and another misaabe (a giant or sorts).
The water level in the Great Lakes receded and fish died by the thousands, throwing the tribes' livelihood into peril. Mishibizhii apparently came out of the Great Lake and killed many, including the most beautiful girl of their tribe named Lu. The narrator described battles with the monster. And how his mother proposed to use a game of chance to get a prize of a child with the Mishibizhii. She told the council of elders that she wanted to "bear a child who might grow big enough to banish the misaabe who now terrorizes our people. We might even be able to breed a race of holy giants."
After a while, I was like, is it a metaphor for the colonialists who came in to take tribal land and killed many people indiscriminately?
Do not ask for the blood-and-gore war story. You could not bear to hear it, nor I to tell it.
I wear a tattered leather pouch around my neck. If you can name the medicine it holds, perhaps you will be the storyteller who finds words when the water again falls away and new monsters spill onto dry land.
Meanwhile, we ride the tide. We remember to laugh and tease on the beaches. We love our dead.
We do not forget.
Monsters roam the earth; sometimes they live inside us.
