BookBrowse Reviews Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

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A vivid collection of linked short stories about addiction swallowing lives on a Maine reservation.

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The stories in Morgan Talty's debut collection Night of the Living Rez center around David, aka Dee, a member of the Penobscot Nation living on a reservation in Maine (see Beyond the Book). The first story introduces David and his best friend Fellis as adults who are making daily trips off the reservation to nearby Overtown to visit a methadone clinic, a fact that is casually tossed off by David as he cuts Fellis's hair free from the ice after Fellis fell asleep drunk in the middle of a frigid swamp. From there, the stories of David and his family and friends unravel over the course of the collection, with threads tangled in the detritus of addiction that litters the landscape of the reservation.

In the stories taking place during David's childhood and teen years, we learn about his sister Paige, his mother and his mother's boyfriend Frick, among others. In the second story, "In a Jar," David discovers "a glass jar filled with hair and corn and teeth" in the dirt outside their house, which Frick interprets as an object meant to place a curse on the family. As a medicine man, Frick knows how to neutralize the threat, but the symbolism is palpable and hangs over the other stories in the collection, as do the multiple references to "Goog'ooks," or "Evil spirits."

The conditions of the reservation are sewn into the fabric of the stories, the details of the daily lives of David and the other characters. There is omnipresent addiction and poverty (David and Fellis earn drug money bringing dead porcupines to "Clara over on Birch Hill" who "used their quills in her regalia"). There is violence, tragedy, mental illness and intergenerational trauma. There is the ceaseless erosion of self-respect as a result of racist abuse that underpins it all. In one story, David and a friend go off the reservation to Overtown to cash a money order from David's father and a group of white men standing outside a bar asks them for cigarettes. When they refuse, the men call them "Greedy fucking Indians," at which point David goads his friend into throwing a rock through the bar's window. The next day, David sees an article in the police blotter section of the newspaper containing the statement of the white men to the police: Two teenagers from the Penobscot Nation approached them and asked for cigarettes, and when they refused, "the teenagers became infuriated and began to harass them, eventually picking up rocks and throwing them toward the establishment."

The pervasive masculinity of these stories is tempered by those that include David's mother, sister and grandmother, all of whom seem to tether him to his life and humanity when he is drifting toward oblivion. In one story, he visits his mother in a "crisis stabilization unit." She drones on repetitively about her sleeplessness, her benzodiazepine prescriptions and the Adam Sandler movie Grown-Ups as he longs to flee. When she suffers a seizure, David's contrition is heartrending, and may be familiar to those who have witnessed a parent's prolonged illness. Meanwhile, a story in which David steals money from his grandmother to buy pills only to immediately lose them effectively demonstrates the futility that underscores a drug problem, in which a person with an addiction can only see the finish line of their next fix, and then the goalposts move to the one after that, and the one after that.

David's narration is delivered with a flat affect, the voice of someone who has come to absorb loss like a sponge. But Talty has a remarkable talent for summoning bizarre imagery and incidents, details that are vividly realistic, funny and vaguely reminiscent of a horror film, like the one referenced in the book's title. In addition to the cursed jar, these details include a woman firing a Super Soaker squirt gun full of her own urine in a store, and a plague of caterpillars squirming across the reservation's roads ("Some were dead, run over by cars and trucks—it sounded like popcorn popping when we drove over it—and others were alive, crawling among the gooey dead in search of trees with leaves they hadn't eaten").

Talty's choice to move back and forth through time rather than present a linear narrative of David's life gives the reader space to interpret and draw their own conclusions about his decisions and the trauma that informs them. The order of the stories means we see him making poor choices long before we come to understand the origins of his behavior (and that of his sister, mother and others). Some readers may struggle to sympathize with David, but no one is asking them to. This is not a redemption story or a story of overcoming obstacles, it's a ghost story about people haunting their own lives.

This review first ran in the July 13, 2022 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.