Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, graphic violence, death, and child abuse. 

In many of the short stories in Never Whistle at Night, the gap between the historical and modern worlds is the source of horror. Most of the stories’ characters live in and maneuver through a contemporary society shaped by Western colonialism. Nevertheless, they face mythical or otherwise traditionally Indigenous figures and conflicts, the resulting dissonance often bolstering the stories’ tension and atmosphere. 

In “Kushtuka,” for example, Tapeesa encounters a kushtuka, a shape-shifting spirit, and must confront a skewed mirror image: “A figure stood before us in the headlights […] she was me. Or would have been, were it not for the pupils that covered the whole of her eyes, and the hideous, obscenely wide grin that distorted the lower half of her face” (9). The kushtuka looks like Tapeesa and is committed to killing Hank, his friends, and his son as revenge for their theft of Inuit cultural objects, their invasive mining operation, and their violence against Inuit people. However, if the mystical spirit is the ostensible source of the story’s horror, the fact that it becomes a manifestation of Tapeesa’s rage against Hank and the other men implies that the true horror lies not in the kushtuka but in the depredations of Western modernity. Here, the traditional world emerges as the protector of the protagonist. 

By contrast, in “Capgras,” the reemergence of a mythical figure torments the protagonist. As Tom struggles with the seemingly incorrect translation of his novel into French, he also struggles with a growing lump on his back: The more stressed Tom becomes, and the more he believes that the French translator misinterpreted his story, the bigger and more painful the lump grows. Tom associates the lump with Kokopelli, a flute-playing figure with a hunchback in southwestern Indigenous cultures. When Tom begins to question his own memories, remembering events that may connect the events of his book with his personal life, the lump bursts: “Then the thing growing in my back burst. The Kokopelli broke through. Blood sprayed the TV. Flute music played from somewhere behind me, or from beneath my skin, which was now sloughing off” (344). This horrifying image represents Tom’s feeling of becoming someone he is not—specifically, a “stereotype” of an Indigenous American, as he calls the Kokopelli. Caught between what he perceives as stereotype on the one hand and outright assimilation (symbolized by the distorted translation) on the other, Tom struggles to find a way to embody authentic Indigeneity—a testament to the difficulty of reconciling past and present in a postcolonial world.