Description
“These are…ghost stories about the power of ghost stories, the way they reflect and transmute shared fears…By juxtaposing horror tropes with all-too-real violence, Turkewitz reveals the everyday darkness we live with…”
-New York Times
“On the simplest level, the collection reads as a stunning mix of creepy tales; on a deeper level, its hauntings double as metaphors for the dangers that girls, women, and those viewed as outsiders navigate on a regular basis. In subtle but striking prose, Here in the Night captures the psychological terrors laced throughout people’s everyday lives.”
–Foreword
“Turkewitz’s nimble prose switches on a dime between soft and sharp, poignant and brutal, alien and achingly familiar. At the heart of each story, however, lies tenderness, magnified and made more precious by the dangers that surround it. This is a triumph.”
-Starred Review in Publishers Weekly
The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.
At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe—at least fleetingly—that anything could happen.
These stories will stay with you.