Best Horror Short Story Collections: 10 Books to Read in One Night

Edgar Allan Poe had one rule for a short story: you should be able to read it in a single sitting, somewhere between half an hour and two hours, because the moment you put it down and go do something else, the spell is broken. He wrote that in 1842, in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.

Like Curry Barker and Jordan Peele, I came to horror through comedy. I did standup and improv five nights a week, first in Shanghai and then in Los Angeles, and the thing comedy teaches you is that a joke and a scare are built the same way: you set up a pattern, you let the audience get half a step ahead of you, and then you surprise them. The only difference is whether the room laughs or screams.

I love horror short stories because they get your heart rate up so quickly. In one sitting, you can get a twist, a shock, a scare, and then head to bed. The authors somehow know how to jump right into the scary bits. Here are the best horror short story collections for a thriller reader who is horror-curious:

The Short Version

• If cults, influencers, and dark comedy are your thing, Perfect Modern Wife is free for a limited time: a successful executive drives out to a famous tradwife influencer’s farm to check on a friend who signed up for the retreat, and nobody will let her see her until it is over. It is the only one here where the woman running the horror is an old best friend with a very good skincare routine.
• If you want the two anthologies that shared the 2023 Bram Stoker shortlist, read Out There Screaming or Never Whistle at Night: nineteen Black writers’ new horror, from a traffic stop where the cars have eyes to a Freedom Riders bus in 1961, and twenty-six Indigenous writers on one superstition, that whistling after dark calls something to you.
• For the writer who taught everyone else the trick, read Let Me Tell You: Shirley Jackson’s uncollected stories, opening with a man followed through a city by a stranger in a light hat, with nothing he could report to the police.
• For the ones built on plot, read Full Throttle or The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: a biker gang hunted down the highway by a big rig driver with a deadly agenda, and a Kindle that downloads books from other worlds.
• For the ones where the horror is a woman’s own body or her own country, read Her Body and Other Parties or The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: eight stories including the legend of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck, retold as a story about who a woman’s body belongs to, and twelve Buenos Aires stories in which the lost and sold children of the city start coming home.
• For the strange end of the shelf, read The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All: seven linked tales near Olympia, Washington, with an altar in the woods.

How I Picked These

For a little context on me: I write short horror stories for TV and film, and one of my books, Perfect Modern Wife, has been optioned by writer-director Joanna Tsanis to become a movie. I read horror short stories because I can finish one in a single sitting. I sit down with a cup of tea, spend the whole night completely engrossed in a terrifying other world, and then I go to bed. Here are my criteria for the best horror short story collections:

1. You jump right into the scary part: From page one there is extreme suspense that gets your heart rate up.
2. The world is specific and strange: It is extremely hard to get someone engrossed in a world with a very limited word count, and the best short horror stories do it anyway.
3. You can finish it in one night: I pick short stories so I get a complete story in one sitting: the setup, the twist, the scare, and then bed.
4. It lingers: You can’t stop thinking about it after you’ve put it down.

At a Glance

Ten horror short story collections, one of them a single story, and what each one is doing differently.

What Are the Best Horror Short Story Collections to Read in One Night?

Ten books, in four groups. The first three are the ones I would hand anyone: a cult with a skincare routine, and the two anthologies that shared the 2023 Bram Stoker shortlist. Four and five are the house, where the horror lives in a kitchen or a body. Six to eight are the engines, where every story has a chase or a clock in it. Then the strange end, Enriquez and Barron, which I’d save for your second night. If you have never read a horror story in your life, start with number two, Out There Screaming.

Group one: start here. One short story about a tradwife cult and two horror anthology books, so you get a sampler of writers before you commit to anyone.

1. Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest (2025)

Read this if: If cults, influencers, and dark comedy are your thing. If you like social commentary on modern trends with a dab of humor.

What you’re getting: A horror-comedy novella. Successful executive Audrey visits her old friend Jessica at a trad wife farm run by their estranged friend-turned-tradwife influencer McKinley, and she can’t help feeling something is off, especially since they won’t let her see Jessica until the retreat is over. Audrey expects organic smoothies and sunset selfies. Instead she finds McKinley crawling across the kitchen floor at 3 AM, hands raw and bleeding, chanting about being the perfect modern wife. Now optioned to become a movie.

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: Audrey has a friend to find, a host who won’t let her see her, and a farm where the women pay to attend and the program has a chore wheel. The cult is an influencer brand, the chanting happens on a kitchen floor at 3 AM, and the jokes sit in the same scenes as the scares. Next to Out There Screaming, which pulls its horror out of American history, this is the one where the worst thing on the farm is the chore wheel.

What readers say:

“I cheered for the women, side-eyed the men, and laughed at the satire threaded through the horror.” — Erika, Goodreads Reviewer.

“If you are obsessed with stories and books like The Wicker Man, Stepford Wives, Midsommer, with the character banter like The Haunting then this book is calling your name!” — Megan Beech, Goodreads Reviewer.

“With its mix of feminist themes, cult vibes, and horror-comedy satire, Perfect Modern Wife is clever, disturbing, and just plain fun.” — Sarah, Goodreads Reviewer.

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2. Out There Screaming by Jordan Peele, editor (2023)

Read this if: it’s here because it won the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology, and because the editor came to horror from comedy too. You want nineteen writers in one book and not a weak one in the bunch.

What you’re getting: An anthology of new Black horror. According to Publishers Weekly, Jordan Peele “brings together 19 Black authors to ‘give us their Sunken Places.’” In N.K. Jemisin’s “Reckless Eyeballing” “The cars have eyes,” and the story is “about a corrupt police officer named Carl who gets his comeuppance for wrongfully pulling people over.” In Tananarive Due’s “The Rider,” “two Freedom Riders on their way to Montgomery, Ala., in 1961, are joined on their bus by a strange being whose presence may spell their doom,” and Maurice Broaddus’s “The Norwood Trouble” “concerns a Reconstruction-era community calling upon higher powers to bring bloody justice to a lynch mob of Night Riders.”

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: This collection is very visceral and terrifying, and it talks about a lot of modern issues in an interesting way. They’re all very good, very visual stories, and I highly recommend it. It won the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology, and the Guardian’s Lisa Tuttle called it “not only likely to be the best anthology of the year, but one for the ages.” Publishers Weekly says these tales “are all both gruesomely imaginative and firmly rooted in the realities of anti-Black racism and brutality–and there isn’t a weak one in the bunch,” and calls the book “essential reading for any horror fan.” Peele wrote sketch comedy for years before he wrote Get Out.

Fair warning: Publishers Weekly describes stories that find “horror in history,” including Freedom Riders in 1961 and a Reconstruction-era lynch mob, so the frights here are built on real violence against real people, not on a haunted house. Read it in the order it is printed, which is the editor’s job, not yours.

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3. Never Whistle at Night by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., editors (2023)

Read this if: it’s here because it was a finalist for the same 2023 Bram Stoker anthology award, and because the whole book grows out of one superstition: don’t whistle at night, or something will answer. You want monsters you can picture.

What you’re getting: An anthology of Indigenous dark fiction. It collects twenty-six stories introduced by Stephen Graham Jones, with Tommy Orange, Rebecca Roanhorse, Cherie Dimaline, Waubgeshig Rice and Morgan Talty among the contributors, and the title comes from a belief shared across many Indigenous cultures that whistling at night can summon evil spirits. Kirkus describes “murky crossings between the human and more-than-human” and stories that take on “intergenerational trauma to environmental destruction to toxic allyship.” It was published as a paperback original, so there is no hardcover to hunt for.

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: These stories do such a phenomenal job of putting you in the world, and the monsters are described so carefully that it really made me shiver. Kirkus calls the storytelling “often spine-tingling and suggestive,” and the Horror Writers Association shortlisted it beside Out There Screaming, the book that beat it. Next to Out There Screaming, which goes back into American history for its monsters, this is the one where the monster is the thing your grandmother told you never to do.

Fair warning: twenty-six stories by twenty-six writers means the quality moves around, and Kirkus says so about the book Hawk and Van Alst put together: “the rest of the stories are somewhat uneven in quality,” inside a review that still calls the whole “entertaining and thought-provoking.” Skip around on the first pass.

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Group two: the house. Two books where the horror lives somewhere domestic: Shirley Jackson’s kitchens, and the inside of a woman’s own body.

4. Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson (2015)

Read this if: it’s here because Shirley Jackson is the writer every other collection on this page is quietly imitating, and these are the stories of hers you have not read. You want the classic, and you want the one where the horror is a frozen garden hose.

What you’re getting: Uncollected and unpublished Shirley Jackson, edited by two of her children. According to Kirkus, it opens with a story called “Paranoia,” which it calls “perfectly crafted,” in which “a seemingly blameless fellow” is “pursued on a crosstown bus, into shops, and down city streets” by an affectless man in a light hat. Publishers Weekly says the selection “ranges from explorations of the supernatural” to “domestic humor” and includes “lectures on writing that she gave at the height of her career.”

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: “Paranoia” is a chase in everything but length. Kirkus says it unfolds “with the to-the-second pacing of a Twilight Zone episode,” and the man being followed cannot go to the police, because “what is there to tell, apart from the fact that someone seems to be tailing him?” That is a chase, and you can feel the clock. Then Kirkus gets to the domestic pieces, a mother wondering who left a hose out to freeze, and notes “That’s a lot of portent for a stretch of rubber.” Next to Her Body and Other Parties, where the body is the haunted house, this is the one where the house itself is enough.

Fair warning: this is a grab bag, not a horror collection. Publishers Weekly says it covers fiction and nonfiction, “domestic humor,” “observations of separated couples” and writing lectures, and admits “Not every piece equals the artistry of ‘The Lottery.’” Kirkus calls the feel “old-fashioned,” though it adds that “her stories never fail to deliver.” Skip the essays on the first pass and read the stories, which is allowed.

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5. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (2017)

Read this if: it’s here because the most famous story in it takes the green-ribbon legend you heard at camp and turns it, in Kirkus’s words, into a blistering exploration of female desire and the insidious entitlement that society claims over the female body. You want horror about power, told by someone who can really write.

What you’re getting: Eight stories. Kirkus says each has “at its center, a strange and surprising idea that communicates, in a shockingly visceral way, the experience of living inside a woman’s body.” In “The Husband Stitch,” Machado “turns the well-known horror story about a girl who wears a green ribbon around her neck inside out.” In “Especially Heinous,” per Publishers Weekly, she “rewrites 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” imagining “Benson haunted by victims, Stabler beset by domestic drama, and both competing with more efficient doppelgangers.”

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: Machado’s whole subject is power, who has it over a woman’s body and what happens when she notices. Publishers Weekly says the stories “make strikingly feminist moves by combining elements of horror and speculative fiction with women’s everyday crises.” Machado’s women are usually acted upon rather than acting, and you watch each one work out what has been done to her. Kirkus puts the register in one sentence: “Machado writes with furious grace.” Next to The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, where the horror comes out of a whole city’s history, this is the one where it comes out of one body.

Fair warning: it is literary and it is explicit. Kirkus notes “They have a lot of sex” and calls out “The fierceness and abundance of sex and desire in these stories,” and one story asks you to “give a paring knife to the listeners.” Publishers Weekly says the stories “entertain, challenge, and move,” so expect all three. The Law & Order story is the least plot-driven thing on this page.

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Group three: the engines. Joe Hill, Stephen King and Paul Tremblay, three writers who put a chase or a clock in every story.

6. Full Throttle by Joe Hill (2019)

Read this if: it’s here because every story has something to lose and a clock running. You want the one where you are never confused about what is happening or why it matters.

What you’re getting: Joe Hill’s second collection. According to Publishers Weekly, it “contains 11 reprints and two new tales,” and opens with “the terrifying ‘Throttle’ (cowritten with Stephen King), which features a biker gang at the mercy of a relentless big rig driver with a deadly agenda.” “Faun” has “a small door in a ramshackle farmhouse” that “leads to a hunting ground,” and in “Dark Carousel” “a group of teens runs afoul of magic that animates the ragtag, bloodthirsty animals of a boardwalk carousel.” Kirkus calls Hill “The poet laureate of everyday terrors.”

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: Kirkus says the stories “have ordinary settings with ordinary people doing ordinary things until something extraordinary happens,” and singles out “Late Returns,” in which “an out-of-work trucker” ends up “behind a bookmobile delivering volumes to denizens of the afterlife, most of whom owe late fees.” Publishers Weekly says his “complex, fully realized characters leap into the imagination.” Next to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, where the stories are quieter and sadder, this is the one that keeps its foot down.

Fair warning: Hill mixes tones on purpose, and you should know going in that he is also political. Kirkus describes a story in which “the zombie apocalypse and addiction to social media are hard to tell apart,” told “In a series of tweets,” and another that is “told in triangles of carefully arranged prose.” Publishers Weekly calls the whole thing “haunting,” which is a compliment and a warning.

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7. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King (2015)

Read this if: it’s here because every story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and King tells you where each one came from before you read it. You want the one where a Kindle links to other worlds.

What you’re getting: Twenty stories and poems, each with a preface. Publishers Weekly says the prefaces explain “what inspired it” and give “insight into King’s writing methods,” and picks out “Ur,” “about a Kindle that links to other worlds,” and “Bad Little Kid,” “about a terrifying murderous child (complete with propeller hat).” Kirkus says “no one has invested ordinary reality and ordinary objects with as much creepiness as King, mostly things that move (cars, kid’s scooters, Ferris wheels).”

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: Kirkus says the pieces “have noble pedigrees, having appeared in places such as Granta and The New Yorker,” and that he often writes “blue-collar people who drink too much, worry about money, and mistrust everything and everyone,” The Kindle story asks, in Kirkus’s quotation, “Is there one–or a dozen, or a thousand–where he quit smoking, lived to be 70, and wrote another half a dozen books?” Publishers Weekly calls the collection “introspective” and says it “draws on the deepest emotions: love, grief, fear, and hope.” Next to Growing Things and Other Stories, where the horror gets meta, this is the one that stays plain.

Fair warning: not all of it is horror, and some of it is barely a story. Kirkus admits the pages are “sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy” and that “Some stories would not have been out of place in the pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s.” Publishers Weekly describes “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” as “tragic” and “Summer Thunder” as “a story about a man and his dog at the end of the world,” so budget for being sad as well as scared.

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8. Growing Things and Other Stories by Paul Tremblay (2019)

Read this if: it’s here because Tremblay writes crime stories and horror stories with the same hands, and one of the nineteen reads like a deleted scene from The Departed. You want the one where the first story’s scariest line is “There are no more stories.”

What you’re getting: Nineteen stories. Kirkus says the title story depicts “a slow apocalypse via invasive plants not as a panorama but as one family’s bitter end,” and that it “contains the book’s most frightening line: ‘There are no more stories.’” Next is “Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks,” about “a junkie” who is “trying to describe her addiction online even as some monster might be nearby.” There are also, in Kirkus’s words, “a couple of hardcore crime stories in ‘The Getaway,’ in which a knockoff artist is struggling to escape his brother’s shadow, and ‘Nineteen Snapshots of Dennisport,’ which might as well have been a deleted scene from Scorsese’s The Departed.”

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: This is the collection where you can see the seam between crime and horror, because Tremblay writes both. Kirkus places Tremblay “among the best in the literary business” and says the stories are “Well-written, yes. But scary as hell.” The crime stories are the bridge, and the meta ones, “Notes for ‘The Barn in the Wild’” and “Something About Birds,” which Kirkus calls “the best, most challenging,” are where you find out whether the structural tricks are for you. Next to Full Throttle, where the engine is always a chase, this is the one where the engine is sometimes how the story is told.

Fair warning: I have only one trade review for this one. Kirkus warns that the best stories are “completely meta” and “structured in unexpected ways,” and mentions “a little fan service” for readers of Tremblay’s novels, with characters from A Head Full of Ghosts returning. If you have not read him before, those two stories will mean less. Start with the title story and “The Getaway.”

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Group four: the strange end. Mariana Enriquez and Laird Barron, where the dread is political or cosmic, and where I would send you second rather than first.

9. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (2021)

Read this if: it’s here because the stories move, and because the monster is a country’s history rather than a ghost. You want horror with a political engine, and you want it to go somewhere.

What you’re getting: Twelve stories, translated by Megan McDowell. Publishers Weekly says “The alleys and slums of Buenos Aires supply the backdrop,” and in the opener, “Angelita Unearthed,” “the bones of a rotting child reanimate after being dug up.” In “Our Lady of the Quarry” “a band of teenage girls turn to witchcraft to snare the object of their desires,” and in “Kids Who Come Back,” which PW calls “the book’s epic and visceral centerpiece,” “the missing, damned, and destitute begin returning home.” Kirkus notes that Enriquez “grew up in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s Dirty War–a trauma that echoes across these stories.”

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: Kirkus says she warps “familiar settings (city parks, an office building, a stretch of neighborhood street) by wefting in the uncanny, supernatural, or monstrously human,” and that “Kids Who Come Back” exposes “an entire populace steeped in guilt but determined to reject its culpability.” Publishers Weekly says her imagination “often reaches sublime heights.” Next to The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, where the horror comes from outside the universe, this is the one where it comes from the newspaper.

Fair warning: it is the most graphic book on this page. Publishers Weekly lists a “heartbeat fetishist,” “two grave-robbing fans of a recently deceased rock star,” and “victims of a pedophile ring” resurrected in Barcelona, and ends with “hopefully they’ll be able to find their way back.” Kirkus calls it “Insidiously absorbing, like quicksand.” Adventurous readers only, and Kirkus explicitly recommends it to fans of Carmen Maria Machado, so read her first.

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10. The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron (2013)

Read this if: it’s here because cosmic horror is the branch of the genre most readers never meet, and Barron is the writer who makes it survivable. You want the one that will feel most unlike anything you have read, in a controlled dose.

What you’re getting: Nine stories, seven of them linked. According to Publishers Weekly, “the seven very different core stories that take place near Olympia, Wash., have reappearing features–howling winds, an altar in the woods, nightmares that dance between dread premonitions and glimpses into the abyss–that work together to form a persistent image of cosmic horror and evil.” The narrators are “well-spoken and introspective,” “torn between bravery and fear and between disbelief and terrified realization.”

Why horror short story collections fans will like it: Nobody is solving anything, and the narrators, in Publishers Weekly’s words, are “torn between bravery and fear and between disbelief and terrified realization.” Publishers Weekly also says the settings “carry the reader relentlessly along without an irrelevant word or image, with an effect that manages a certain sort of grace within raw brutality.” Next to Out There Screaming, where nineteen writers each get one shot at you, this is the one where a single voice closes in.

Fair warning: I have only one trade review for this one, and it is honest about the weak spots. Publishers Weekly says “The two stories outside the Olympia cycle are much weaker,” calling “Vastation” a “solipsistic, egomaniacally insane fugue” that “creates confusion rather than shivers” and “More Dark” “an obscure tribute to author Thomas Ligotti and horror fan conventions.” Read the seven Olympia stories and skip those two without guilt.

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Which One to Read Tonight

Three moods, three books, starting with the one you can read for free.

• You want the funny one with a cult: Perfect Modern Wife. It is the only one here where the woman running the place used to be her wild friend who drank way too much tequila.
• You want the one everybody will be talking about: Out There Screaming, which won the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology. Start with N.K. Jemisin’s traffic stop and keep going.
• You want the one that will make you check the window: Never Whistle at Night, one story at a time, with the lights on. The monsters are described so carefully that it really made me shiver.

If none of those three fits, my list of short horror books covers the novellas and the collections you can finish in an evening, horror comedy books is for when you want the jokes left in, and psychological horror books is for when the monster is a person.

FAQ: Horror Short Story Collections

What Are the Best Horror Short Story Collections?

These ten, in the order above: Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest, Out There Screaming, Never Whistle at Night, Let Me Tell You, Her Body and Other Parties, Full Throttle, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Growing Things and Other Stories, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. They are grouped by what kind of horror they are, the starting three, the house, the engines and the strange end, not ranked.

What Is the Best Horror Short Story Collection for Beginners?

Out There Screaming, because an anthology gives you nineteen writers to try, and Publishers Weekly says “there isn’t a weak one in the bunch.” If cults, influencers and dark comedy are more your thing, Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest is free for a limited time: a woman goes to a famous tradwife influencer’s farm to check on a friend, and nobody will let her see her until the retreat is over.

What Makes a Good Horror Short Story?

A good horror short story gets the suspense going on the first page, builds one specific world in a few thousand words, and stays with you after you have put it down. Edgar Allan Poe argued in 1842 that a short story should be read in one sitting so that nothing interrupts its single effect. Ellen Datlow, the anthology editor, told the Horror Writers Association that a good horror story needs “the building of a sense of unease in the reader, the feeling that something is seriously wrong,” and that a great one “stays with me and won’t let go.”

Are Horror Short Story Collections Good for People Who Don’t Usually Read Horror?

Yes, and an anthology is the best place to start, because if one writer is too much for you the next story is somebody else. Out There Screaming and Never Whistle at Night each give you at least nineteen writers in one book. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is the gentlest single-author pick for a new reader, since Kirkus calls it “sometimes-scary, sometimes merely gloomy” and each story comes with King’s own note on where it came from.

What Are the Best Horror Anthologies?

Out There Screaming, which won the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology, and Never Whistle at Night, which was shortlisted beside it. Both were also nominated for the 2023 Shirley Jackson Award for edited anthology. Of the horror anthology books of 2023, Out There Screaming collects nineteen Black writers’ new horror, and Publishers Weekly says “there isn’t a weak one in the bunch.” Never Whistle at Night collects twenty-six Indigenous writers under a title taken from one superstition. Among the best horror anthologies of any year, those two made both shortlists.

What Are the Best Scary Short Story Collections by Women?

Her Body and Other Parties and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, in that order. Kirkus calls Machado’s book “An exceptional and pungently inventive first book,” and Kirkus recommends Enriquez to “enthusiasts of weird fiction and literary horror and of writers like Samanta Schweblin, Amber Sparks, Ayse Papatya Bucak, and Carmen Maria Machado.” For scary short story collections from the writer they both descend from, Let Me Tell You. Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest is the one here where the horror is a tradwife farm, and the only one that asks “what are you willing to do for your friends?”

Which Horror Short Stories for Adults Are Actually Scary?

For horror short stories for adults that will frighten you rather than unsettle you, start with the opening story of Full Throttle, then Laird Barron’s Olympia stories, then The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, the most graphic book here. Publishers Weekly describes the Hill story as “a biker gang at the mercy of a relentless big rig driver with a deadly agenda,” Publishers Weekly says the Barron stories form “a persistent image of cosmic horror and evil,” and Kirkus calls the Enriquez book “Insidiously absorbing, like quicksand,” which it means as praise.

Which Horror Short Story Is Good for a Book Club?

Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest, because it gives a club one question to fight about: a famous tradwife influencer runs a farm where women pay to learn to be like her, the executive who comes to check on a friend is her old best friend, and the rule is simple: Audrey cannot see Jessica until the retreat is over. As Goodreads reviewer Lyndsey put it: “So many unexpected twists, it almost read like a horror/satire.” For a second meeting, pick one story each from Her Body and Other Parties and Full Throttle and compare the two kinds of fear.

Is Never Whistle at Night Scary?

Yes. Never Whistle at Night builds twenty-six stories on a warning shared across many Indigenous cultures, that whistling after dark can call evil spirits to you, and the monsters are described so carefully that it really made me shiver. Kirkus calls the storytelling “often spine-tingling and suggestive” and names the real terrors underneath it, “from intergenerational trauma to environmental destruction to toxic allyship.”

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