Reviews with content warning for Chronic illness - Night of the Living Rez

Reviews tagging 'Chronic illness'

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

5 reviews

rnorthie's review

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

4.0

This is a hard book to rate. The writing was beautiful and I loved the challenge of piecing the stories together and the last 2 stories were amazing (in a sad tragic way). I think in general some of the stories weren’t my favorite but it didn’t take away from the intrigue they slowly built up to the last two stories. Definitely worth a read.

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mercerhanau's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

I started listenings to the audiobook on a friend’s recommendation (can't remember who?) without actually reading the back-of-book-type introduction at all. I think I went into it expecting something more supernatural/horror, which is not exactly what this book delivers (in the usual way). I set myself up for genre disappointment, so take my review with a grain of salt.

It’s a reflective set of stories, looking at slices of life from the narrator as a child, teenager, and mid/late 20s, looking back from later in life. Lots of drinking and suffering from drug addition, wanting to get clean. Depressing, occasionally funny, a LOT of scenes with varying degrees of nausea, dry heaving, and vomit. Unpleasant. But there are also scenes of tenderness that help flesh out the characters.

The title (and a couple references to zombies) encouraged me to look for what could be “horror” or the supernatural in stories that otherwise feel like a fictionalized memoir. Animal presences serve as metaphors that connect interpersonal struggles to the natural world in all its power, chaos, and… stenches.

More thoughts on real-life "horror": SPOILERS / Content Warnings

Horrors of caterpillar corpse carpets, decaying snapping turtle smell, miscarriage, child deaths, postpartum depression, having a dead twin (like a teratoma?), feeling responsible (sort of) for a sick infant’s death while still a child yourself, social services knocking incessantly at the door while home alone with one’s sister’s baby (feels like a zombie movie), dementia resurrecting ghosts/memories of long-dead relatives, witnessing physical and sexual violence, car crash, feeling disconnected from one’s body and mind in the throes of drug addition and withdrawal.

Feels like an important story to tell. Nuanced representation of a deeply interconnected Native community and family. The writing style and characters didn’t resonate with me, and that’s okay! I definitely see why other people love the book.

Cf. / Reminded me of themes in…
- Wellness, by Natan Hill:

psychologically shifting stories and guilty uncertainty about what really happened during a childhood tragedy.

- The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones:

Indigenous perspective on spooky pregnancy stuff. The horror of nature (esp. animal-related). Losing contact with indigenous knowledge that might have helped prevent/dispel the horror.

- Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare, by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto:

More spooky reproductive/fertility stuff, whether supernatural or just things that happen to human bodies that aren’t talked about thanks to patriarchy keeping reproduction a mysterious, taboo subject. Complex feelings about family dynamics, both tender and cruel.

- This Thing Between Us, by Gus Moreno:

curses, generational trauma, feeling haunted by lost loved ones and/or forces beyond our understanding. Losing one’s mind a lil bit. Gore. Technology running amok, sometimes in subtle ways: Grammy’s car radio turns on by itself, like the Itza (Echo Dot equivalent) in TTBU.

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just_one_more_paige's review

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challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

This recent release is one that mostly made it onto my TBR list after being offered as an ALC from Libro.fm. Once that got it on my radar, I did see a couple reviews for it pop up here and there, everything really positive, but it just seems like the proverbial publication splash it made was small. I hadn’t read a lot of short story collections this year – I mean I don’t usually read that many, but I was due for one is more the point – so I figured why not give it a try.

In this collection, a series of vignettes of inter-related characters, the reader gets a number of glimpses into the lives of members of the Penobscot tribe, on a reservation in Maine. So many aspects are universally recognizable, addiction and drug misuse, grandparents suffering from Alzheimer’s, poverty and lack of access to quality services, money-making schemes, the made-up games of young friends, etc. And yet, each story is also presented to the reader within the unique framework of living in tribal land, the intergenerational traumas that are unique to this population, and the traditional beliefs around curses and medicine and healing of the Penobscot.

So, everything about this work made it seem like short stories, even the subtitle is “stories,” and I understand that most of them we published separately in multiple publications before being brought together here. But I have read books advertised as novels that are less connected than this. It took me a bit to catch on, but the MC in every story was the same, just his age (and what people nicknamed him) changed. That being said, this is a number of vignettes without a specific plot-unfolding, I guess, and yet they build to a final two chapters that, as the “before” and “after” of the previous stories converge, give us both a “what happened to delineate the before from the after” and a “looking back from a far future perspective” that really do wrap things up with a fairly traditional denouement. All that to say, the structure and presentation was slightly different than anticipated, and I will be giving a normal “altogether” review, as opposed to blurbs about each individual story like I normally do for collections.

Because these are vignette-style, they are able to give really impactful snapshot insights to different relationships or interactions or moments, that highlight the key aspects of these characters and their identities, without the pressure of having to overly connect them to each other. This allows each chapter/story to be particularly striking, ether emotionally or in observation, and makes the overall impact of the book that much greater. Included in these topics of great impact are: addiction and mental health/illness (in general and specifically related to the experience as a indigenous person), the way the youth see and interpret said struggles with mental health, the varieties of casual violence of life on/off/adjacent to the reservation, the way that getting older makes you view and understand your parents in such different ways, the specific tragedy of memory loss/Alzheimer’s, the choices related to how and with who we spend our time, trauma of all varieties (inherited, experienced, observed), and more.

Talty also really delves into the complexities of pride in your heritage and who you are, juxtaposed with a world that contradicts that with messages of your worthlessness constantly, and how one deals with that. It really comes as no surprise that mental illness and addiction as a result. There are many forms of addiction/substance misuse represented, but in particular, the role of smoking/cigarettes in everything - all interactions and relationships and daily life - it’s was repeated to a point of literary excess. Other than (obviously) being a baseline daily reality, I felt sure that it meant something more (in context, as a metaphor, etc.), but I am not sure I could ever get a handle on what it might be. It just felt like…more. IN addition, there is a great and consistent juxtaposition of contemporary life and traditional beliefs, some touching and poignant, some demoralizing/upsetting, and some just observational, but all crafted with a deft hand.

Lastly, I want to address this being categorized as horror. The reference/implication of the title definitely makes that feel stronger than it actually comes across on page. There are a few creepy sort of moments, with the curse in a jar and dead caterpillars sections, and I guess you could argue the pugwagees mythology (one of my favorite little sections to read – I love cultural fantasy/mythology) in the titular story quality as a sort of “story told to scare kids” situation, but for someone as big a scaredy-cat as me….it felt pretty chill on the horror front. I will say, the ending (final story) came as a (big!) surprise to me (cw: child death), and I guess after that I could see how it might tilt the overall collection over into horror.

There was a deep, smoldering sort of feel to this collection, a banked – never extinguished but never with enough time/energy to bring it to full flame – sort of anger at the inevitability David’s life. I actually wished, as this was presented as a story collection, that we had a chance to get a few other perspectives, particularly those of David’s mother and sister, or his grandmother, or his friend Fellis’ mother. And this feeling only grew as we read the last story and find out what the major/defining event in David’s young life was – based on what happened, and how David’s family chose to handle it, I would really have appreciated more from the (older than David) female characters. Other than that, the deep ring of truth within each of these stories, and nuance of the characters, and the lovely writing of it all, was very high quality.

“…I sensed that even though their problems were their own, there was no escaping how these problems shaped us all, no escaping the end, like the way the ice melts in the river each spring, overflowing and and creeping up the grassy banks and over lawns, reaching farther and farther towards the houses until finally the water touched stone, a gentleness before the river converged on the foundation, seeping inside and flooding basements, insulation swelling, drying only when the water has receded.”

“I wonder if How’d we get here? is the wrong question. Maybe the right question is How do we get out of here? Maybe that's the only question that matters.”

“Maybe even wishing I was a winooch and didn't live on a reservation whose history was in a little museum and could be stolen for a buck. Didn't make any sense that parts of us were worth so much and at the same time we were worth so little.”

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readingwithkaitlyn's review

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dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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sidneyreads_'s review

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated

4.5

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