Here in the Night

by Rebecca Turkewitz

Overview

“ Turkewitz’s nimble prose switches on a dime between soft and sharp, poignant and brutal, alien and achingly familiar... This is a triumph.” -Publisher’s Weekly
“These are… ghost stories about the power of ghost stories, the way they reflect and transmute shared fears” -New York Times
The thirteen stories in 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.
These stories will stay with you.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625570574
Publisher:	Black Lawrence Press
Publication date:	07/21/2023
Pages:	172
Sales rank:	1,200,595
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.42(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of the story collection, Here in the Night (2023). Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Normal School, The Masters Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/22/2023

The 13 horror shorts in Turkewitz’s harrowing and gorgeous debut collection catalog the small, lonely holes in the world that people fall through—and the ghosts that follow them on the way down. “At This Late Hour” introduces a 30-something employee at a haunted hotel who contrasts her own desire for romantic security and stability with the passion that made the hotel’s purported ghost throw herself into the ocean. “The Attic” finds two teenage girls exploring their romantic feelings for each other as they pack up an attic and together compose the story of the ghost that haunts it. In the eerie flash fiction piece “Warnings,” a high school girls’ track team learns they can’t outrun the dangers adults have warned them about. The standout title story follows a lesbian couple whose car has broken down on a bad stretch of road on the same day as the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and the two become hyper-aware of the precarity of their situation. 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. (July)

Publishers Weekly