Night of the Living Rez: Stories

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, American Academy of Arts & Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, The New England Book Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree

A Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Chautauqua Prize 2023, and Barnes & Noble Discover Book Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Esquire, Oprah Daily, and more

Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.

In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author show more Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs.

A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: When a new voice speaks in a jaded crowd, it feels like being next to a rocket launch does. The sound is so loud, so intense, its pressure unbalances your legs and knocks you back on your heels.

Morgan Talty, laddies and gentlewomen. From the first story, where we're confronted with cultural touchstones not in upper-class white peoples' frames of reference, we're in assured hands...the limning of the setting, the colors of the relationship dynamics, the milieu, all in three paragraphs...and challenged to accept the entire package as it is.

"Fucking bullshit, fucking goddamn winter, what the fuck."
I laughed.
"It ain't funny, Dee."
"Look," I said. "Do you want me to cut my braid too?"

I shall, comme d'habitude, use the Bryce Method to assess the stories one-by-one.

Burn is the story I quoted above. A short, sharp shock, a shot across the bow of your luxury literary yacht, a foghorn on a sunny cruise. Disorienting by design, this is your chance to return to familiar shores.

I didn't. 5 impressed stars

In a Jar follows David studying his fractured family as it re-forms in unfamiliar ways. His much older sister, first an absence, then a hard sharp corner; his Mumma, inscrutable to kid-eyed David, touchy and strange; Frick, a man new to David and in a place his abandoned father once didn't want.

All the surprise in this concatenated chain of beings comes from knockings in walls, from jars of ill will, from refrigerated poisons ingested through other mouths. 5 more stars

Get Me Some Medicine follows low-life Fellis...the one talking to Dee in the quote all the way above...as he and Dee scrape the bottom of the barrel, drain the butt-end-filled last can of beer, and do themselves no good whatever doing it.

You can't save people. Nor should you, after a while, try. I don't think these boys, these pushing-thirty boys, can be saved. And neither do they. Dee is, at the very least, possessed of glimmers of self-awareness; Fellis, none. 4*

Food for the Common Cold shakes the ugly bits you never tell your partner loose. David, eleven now, can't quite grasp why Frick is so angry; Mumma can't tell him, he's too young; his Dad's far away and shut out like always; so it festers and seethes, finally David lances the boil out of fear for his mother, and out it all oozes for everyone to see, smell, and finally clean up.

Leaving David sick with, what, a cold? A cloggy, soggy cold? Maybe, maybe more. 4.5*

In a Field of Stray Caterpillars gets useless shitty Fellis even deeper into the badness, as he's now got Dee driving him home from his ECT treatments then spending the night there...and Dee's got a white woman on the line, knowing there's never going to be a good ending to that story, still running from what he knows he needs to do by using Fellis.

And this night, the one we're joining the boys to live through, is in the midst of a major mating season overload. The reek of the rotting animals mirrors Fellis and Dee's vacuity by filling the world with a passing stink that won't even result in better-nourished weeds. Fellis is so far gone the nurses are taking about putting a port in him so they don't have to hunt for a vein when they need to fry him with ECT.

How perfect. 5*

The Blessing Tobacco is a family...David's family, now with his much-older sister home...coming to terms with the end of an elder's life, when her body will not die at the same rate as her mind. It's just terrible and painful and all folded in with each others' craziness, fear, and anger.

Outliving your mind is a terrible curse. Outliving your family? Oh. It's scalding water on an icy windshield. 5*

Safe Harbor isn't...when is it ever? How do you ever know when you're going to have that moment of final fear? The one that changes your orientation in the world, the one where you are not the same person between seconds? David becoming Dee doesn't happen in front of us. But happen it does and we don't know him one speck better than before. 5*

Smokes Last brings me face-to-face with one of my most beloathèd addictions: cigarettes. I despise smokers. They reek, they're so unbelievably selfish, taking up all the air in a room and then flinging the leftover chunk of spit-soaked stinking garbage wherever and however it suits them, slowly drowning in the phlegm they hack onto streets and sidewalks for other people to deal with.

And here's fourteen-year-old David shovin' one into his mouth, "just suck a cock! it tastes better and at least somebody's happy!" I want to (maybe did) shout at him. He and his buds out bein' hooligans, beatin' each other up, chuckin' rocks...kids are so much the same everywhere.

Growing up. Not getting any guidance. No wonder what happens happened. 4*

Half-Life is the sharp part of the descent. It's harrowing and appalling and brutally bitterly honest. 4.5*

Earth, Speak is rock bottom. Harrowing. 5*

Night of the Living Rez would've been more palatable if it'd been zombies, or pugwagees; instead it was all over the fucking TV because of course it was and, if it'd been a white woman, it would've been self defense. 5 appalled stars

The Name Means Thunder burns in my head. The sheer horror of what happens when you can't undo a deed. The never-ending awfulness of life's worst moments defining you, charting your course. Too many undone deeds that lead to a done one. The worst of it is: you can't not see it in every moment of every awful undone deed. 5*

Morgan Talty's debut. Can you even imagine having this in you and no way for it to come out that won't change...everything. show less

At first, Night of the Living Rez can feel disorienting. The stories are linked, with recurring characters, but they are not presented in a clear timeline. It takes time to understand who is who, and where each piece fits. That initial friction is real.

However, once the connections begin to emerge, the book deepens significantly.

Each story works on its own, but they become far more powerful when read as part of the whole. The links between them—shared characters, repeated patterns, shifting circumstances—add weight and meaning that isn’t immediately obvious. What might seem like a straightforward story early on gains additional resonance once you recognize how it echoes or contrasts with others.

Talty uses this non-linear structure show more to reflect cycles rather than progression. Characters don’t move neatly from one stage of life to another. Instead, they repeat behaviors, circle back, and exist in overlapping states of struggle, care, and survival. The structure reinforces this idea, making the reading experience feel fragmented at first, but ultimately cohesive in a different, more organic way.

By the end, the book isn’t about assembling a clean timeline. It’s about building a layered understanding of a community and the people within it.

I enjoyed this collection, but it asks the reader to do some work upfront. Once it clicks, though, the individual stories become stronger because of the connections between them—and those connections are what make the book memorable. show less

This follows the lives of several Penobscot tribal members living on the reservation in Maine beginning in their teen age years. The jumps in time make it ‘not quite a novel’ but on the other hand I would call it more than just connected short stories.

This falls firmly into the category of ‘life on the reservation sucks’: drugs, drug dealing, alcoholism and parents choosing their addictions over kids struggling to have enough to eat.

It’s gritty and well written. I enjoyed the details of a tribe that I wasn’t familiar with, although fundamentally so many of the problems were sadly similar to the western tribes in my state.

But then you get to the last chapter, a jump of several decades. I was ambushed. I was heartbroken. show more Suddenly the description on the back cover that this book “what it means to live, survive and to persevere after tragedy” which had been puzzling to me, came sharply into focus.

I won’t forget this one. But how to rate it? The writing may deserve 5 stars, but I’m not sure I’d ever reread it. show less

Night of the Living Rez is a remarkable work of fiction, a set of a dozen short stories that can be read as a novel moving back and forth in time. Night of the Living Rez is set on Penobscot territory in Maine. The novel has a single narrator, David, but his age ranges widely across the stories, from a young boy to an elderly man reflecting on the past. In other stories he's in his late teens or late twenties. David's narrative voice is powerful and holds this collection together every bit as much as the interconnected plot elements within it. Night of the Living Rez if the kind of fiction that compels oxymorons: it's beautiful in its brutality; strangely gentle in its unflinching honesty; simultaneously bleak and loving. The stories show more embrace despair while also celebrating survival. Night of the Living Rez is a debut work that promises exceptional work to come. Read this book, then keep an eye out for Morgan Talty's next undertaking.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher for review purposes; the opinions are my own. show less

Morgan Talty's debut collection is a wonderful addition to the canon of fiction related to the native american experience. I have always loved the works of Louise Erdrich and the way the customs and lore intertwine with the depiction of her characters. Here too we have a very real description of a boy growing up on a reservation in Maine. The stories are told in first person alternating between the younger David and the older Dee, same person. He lives with his mom, sister Paige and his mom's boyfriend Frick. Each story is a stand alone entity but the collection provides various experiences and insights into his life. It is not a happy existence and themes of addiction, poverty and trauma run through most of the stories, combinations of show more humor and despair;the last two are the most climatic. Highly recommend this collection and look forward to more of his work.

Lines:
At the bridge to the reservation, the river was still frozen, ice shining white-blue under a full moon. The sidewalk on the bridge hadn’t been shoveled since the last nor-easter crapped snow in November, and I walked in the boot prints everyone made who walked the walk to Overtown to get pot or catch the bus to wherever it was us skeejins had to go, which wasn’t anywhere because everything we needed — except pot — was on the rez. Well, except Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond, but those Natives who bought 4K Ultra DVDs or fresh white doilies had cars, wouldn’t be taking the bus like me or Fellis did each day to the methadone clinic. That's another thing the rez didn’t have: a methadone clinic. But we had sacred grounds where sweats and peyote ceremonies happened once a month, except since I had chosen to take methadone, I was ineligible to participate in Native spiritual practice, according to the doc on the rez.

Natives damning Natives. show less

Twelve interconnected stories set on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation give episodic glimpses into the childhood and young adulthood of the central character, David, along with his family and friends. A small and sparsely populated area, Indian Island is literally and figuratively isolated, by rivers and poverty and social stagnation. The horror reference of the titular story indeed refers to this latter aspect:

I passed by a large boulder - rolled and placed back when the reservation was a burial ground. Couldn’t tell that to anyone, though, because people talked Pet Sematary. But it was true - this reservation was for the dead.

With not much happening, substance abuse is the main pastime of most of these characters. David and show more his best friend Fellis get their daily methadone treatments, smoke, and drink. David’s older sister Paige uses heroin. His mom and stepfather drink heavily. These dependencies are treated matter of fact; the characters are treated with humanity.

A frayed but still intact connection to their tribe’s history and identity provides a measure of meaning and creative outlet for the characters. Penobscot mythology and spiritual belief weave through the stories, and David’s stepfather is an occasional medicine man who tries to provide some protection for the family through the ceremonial and ritualistic methods he knows. Whether they do much good outside of providing some sense of purpose is pretty hard to see, of course, and ultimately they can’t save his own body from his pain and addiction.

Coming with cover blurbs from Brandon Hobson and Tommy Orange, among others, this collection introduces a promising young writer from the Native American community. show less

I pre-ordered Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty earlier in the year and it quickly became one of my most anticipated reads. From the moment I read the summary, I knew I would love it but didn't expect for it to crawl its way into the deepest parts of my heart and stay there.

The novel is told in short stories that interconnect and span time periods on the Penobscot Reservation. You are introduced to life on the rez where you see the lasting effects of settler colonialism and its consequences. You have characters dealing with poverty, addiction, failing health, lack of resources, loss of a child, grief, domestic conflict, broken homes and becoming a caregiver. Talty gives you an unflinching view of what it means to be Penobscot in show more Maine and he shows you what is at the heart of his community.

These stories are full of tragedy, friendship, sadness and the mundane aspects of life on the rez. Each story gives you insight into the key players and some background into how they became who they are now. By the time the I got to the last story 'The Name Means Thunder' I was gutted completely as they all came full circle.

What stays with me is the undying love Indigenous people have for each other. How they show up for each there, never abandon one another and continue to stay rooted to their ancestors and their ways is at the core of this novel. The Penobscot people continue to survive and cling to their community to anchor them. I love how Talty shows that the bonds of family are not defined by blood alone but rather that family can be your inheritance. Family can be redefined as how you push forward past tragedy. Familial responsibility takes different forms in the novel but at the center is always love even when it doesn't look like it.

Talty brought these characters to life and by the end I just wanted them to be okay because of all the losses they continued to experience. This was storytelling at its finest. If I could sum this one up in one word it would be haunting. This one will one will stay pressed up against the pit of your stomach long after you finish. I am in awe of what Talty accomplished in these pages and I will be anxiously waiting for more. show less