“The Land Is Hungry Here”: A Review of the Short Story Collection NORTHERN NIGHTS

elichvar
Oct 14
5 min read

Michael Kelly, Editor

Northern Nights

Undertow Publications / 2024 / 296 pages / $20

Reviewed by V. A. Vazquez / October 2025

Michael Kelly’s anthology of Canadian horror fiction, Northern Nights, begins with a land acknowledgment. “I am a settler,” the editor professes, and it is this—the act of inhabiting, of intruding, of invading—that permeates most strongly throughout these twenty original short stories. There are few landscapes as brutal and savage as the Canadian wilderness, and the authors featured within (some well-known, like Mexican Gothic’s Silvia Moreno-Garcia, others making their publishing debut) grasp that true terror comes not from the things that go bump in the night, but rather from the night itself. Northern Nights succeeds in blending horror conventions with a critical examination of Canadian ecology, history, and identity. The horror may be concrete in some stories (with ghosts, monsters, and even Old Scratch himself making an appearance), ambiguous or existential in others, but it is always present.

The topographies contained in this book refuse to adhere to anything as conventional as a map. Instead, they shift, they transform, they mutate with every flip of the page. In Rory Say’s “The Key to Black Creek,” a mother who’s lost custody of her only child flees with him into the wilderness, to the homestead where the cult that raised her resided. The night turns against the protagonist as she finds herself unmoored in both space and time: “As the narrow road straightened out and stretched on, she was struck for a moment by the uncanny sense of being suspended, of moving interminably in place, from nowhere to nowhere, an infinite span of road ahead and behind.” Naben Ruthnum’s “Every Friday” features a musician, out on tour, passing the vacant lot where a “shotgun shack,” long since bulldozed, used to stand, only to have the shack reappear later as time seems to have lost its grasp on the events. In Simon Strantzas's “The Needle Song,” a sudden thunderstorm transforms an idyllic middle school adventure into a disorienting nightmare. When confronted with an “impossible” field, their teacher-guide can only scratch his head in bewilderment and observe that “This shouldn’t be here.” He’s referring to the field; however, the same could be said for the characters who wander into uncharted territory. With nothing but empty space in all directions, they find themselves trapped. Say’s cult patriarch’s insistence that hell will always be waiting at the end of the road shifts, for many of these protagonists, from a threat to an inevitability.

In the excellent “Sandstone,” Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s protagonist refers to “thin places,” with “permeable membranes” that allow otherworldly forces to slip through. During a seaside vacation, she must decide how to proceed when her husband, who has eroded her independence as surely as the tides have eroded the shore, goes for a late-night swim and doesn’t return, appearing to slip through the water into some dark unknown. In EC Dorgan’s “Prairie Teeth,” the protagonist finds her quiet, unfulfilling life interrupted by a handsome stranger who seems to materialize on her doorstep; his sinister nature quickly becomes clear, and she finds herself playing a high-stakes and viscerally gruesome game of dice. While the antagonists disappear into and emerge from geographic “thin places,” the protagonists find themselves in their own personal in-between states—eager to discover their power but held down by forces beyond their control: in Moreno-Garcia’s case, a controlling and abusive husband; in Dorgan’s, an avaricious landlord, a distant family, and a society that doesn’t value single, childless women.

In some of the stories, these “thin places” end up being metatextual. Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s disorienting “Jane Doe’s Tongue” follows a reclusive woman desperate for company. She discovers the tongueless Jane Doe unconscious in a ditch outside her house and brings her inside. As similarities between the protagonist and her strange guest emerge, questions arise: Is Jane Doe real or a hallucination? Is the tonguelessness itself real or rather a metaphor for how trauma can snatch the language right out of our mouths? Rich Larson’s “Do Not Open” is another standout, mostly due to its hilarious and bewildering narrative voice. The protagonist has been genetically blessed (or is it cursed?) with the ability to discern a predatory species that hunts mankind, disguising itself as phone booths and vending machines and luring unsuspecting victims into its razor-toothed maw. In this story, full of strikeouts and side notes, we follow the protagonist’s quest to rid the land of these predators. However, as we learn more about him, we’re forced to question if he’s stuck in the “thin space” between sanity and delusion, reframing him as the actual monster of this tale.

Perhaps Northern Nights is at its best when it makes use of Canada’s rich history in addition to its geography, particularly the period of forced displacement and assimilation of Indigenous peoples (the mid-eighteenth through mid-twentieth centuries). David Neil Lee’s “The Church and the Westbound Train,” a retelling of Dracula with all the trappings of a Western, finds us in a picturesque prairie town, populated by the Aboriginal Métis, soon after a shipment arrives from the east, carrying a dangerous cargo—a European stranger who seeks to be invited into their homes, their businesses, their churches. This unwanted visitor takes on new meaning when framed against the colonizing Anglo-Canadians’ attempts to exert control over the Métis way of life during the nineteenth century. At the end of the story, it’s revealed the monster was intentionally shipped into the Métis town by John A. MacDonald, the prime minister of Canada, who approved the execution of the Métis leader and sought to consolidate national power in Ottawa (thus the danger of the eastbound train). In Camilla Grudova’s “The Fragments of an Earlier World,” the patriarch, clinging pathetically to his family’s noble Scottish lineage, invites cousins from their ancestral homeland to stay with them. The cousins, however, turn out to be impoverished, off-putting, and possibly dangerous. “Earlier World” is glutted with grotesque imagery of a decaying world: the mother’s “blue, green, and hairy” infected breast, a painting hanging in the living room that’s been unintentionally shellacked with mutton grease, dislodged eyeballs giving way to “red pockets filled with pus.” Even inventions meant to enhance their way of life—the flush toilets, the gas lamps—are full of filth and blood, and stink of flatulence, respectively. “Earlier World” demonstrates the perils of venerating a corrupt past defined by empire, our blindness when looking back on a genteel way of life that never actually existed.

Northern Nights provides not only an array of diverse narratives for those interested in the strange, the dark, and the macabre, but also an insightful glimpse into Canada’s history and national identity. In the opening story, Nayani Jensen’s “Rescue Station,” the desperate wife character laments, “We should never have come.” Perhaps she’s right, but if you’re going to venture into the dark of the Northern wilds, you can trust that, with this collection of authors, you’re in good hands.

V. A. Vazquez is an MFA candidate in fiction at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. A resident of Western New York, she teaches upper school English. Her debut novel, The Death Row Club, will be published by Simon & Schuster in summer 2026.