Last year’s excellent novel from author Morgan Talty, Fire Exit, was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2025. Irish readers can now read Talty’s debut title, Night of the Living Rez, which is available here this month. Set on the Penobscot reservation in Maine, it’s a pitch-perfect example of the linked short stories genre.
The stories are non-linear, weaving in and out of narrator David’s journey from when he is a small boy trying to struggle with his parents’ broken marriage, to a crisis in his late 20s, as his life spirals out of control.
Along the way we take in the experiences of a small Native American community that is doubly disenfranchised by virtue of being a minority group as well as residents of a small rural reservation challenged by poverty.
One of Talty’s standout talents is the way he crams multiple, often sensory details into his narrative, so that they vividly create the scene, introduce a back story, tell a good yarn and even make you smile without making it overworked or dense.
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Horror is a shadow slipping in and out of the narrative. A plague of squirming, moribund caterpillars carpets the ground of the rez one summer, stinking as they die. In Half Life the apocalyptic scenario sees two men wasting drug-blitzed days in an abandoned chemical silo.
The themes explored are dark, overall. But the characters, who come into focus as the stories move forward, can be mischievous, entertaining, shocking – and their flaws touch the reader, their bad decisions twist the heart – or make us laugh out loud.
At one point Klonapin-addled Fellis delivers his mother’s Adderall prescription to his auntie, who is expecting her usual blood pressure meds. Later Auntie Alice quips, “at least I got my bills done”. It is a horror story that is not a “horror story”. It’s a book about addiction that is not a book “about addiction” – it’s a heartfelt, rich tapestry about childhood, growing up, family, loss, poverty and illness.
Riddled through it, however, is that self-destructive, life-destroying urge to not have to experience all the above. The rampant over-prescription of legally available drugs – otherwise known as the great American opioid crisis – drenches the lives of the community in Night of the Living Rez. A riveting debut.
