A review by seeceeread
This Town Sleeps by Dennis E. Staples

When crossing into the reservation where my mother lives, and any reservation, really, there's an interesting transformation: the land becomes a mix of feral beauty and man-made blight. On one side of the highway you can see nature at its finest, and on the other, humans at their worst.

Marion has returned to the small town where he grew up. He adopts a dog and starts a relationship with a closeted former classmate. And then he's visited by a revenant, a once-murdered teen who sometimes inhabits the ghostly body of a wolf. As he tries to figure out why this spirit trails him, he uncovers some dark connections.

Staples compellingly digs into reservation details: basketball as a symbol of social mobility, brotherhoods of young men labeled gangs, substance misuse, despair. We skip from a man riddled with shame at his sexuality to a weird encounter in a sweat lodge, and from an alcoholic mother who's just fallen out of sobriety to a young woman who's love never met their daughter. I think this is meant to be interconnected short stories, with various chapters narrated by different people. Perhaps it was the flat audio delivery that rendered too many characters in a similar voice, or maybe it was the similarity in perspective granted too many characters ... but this felt unpolished. I never felt invested in the plot, either; I kept waiting for the part that would bring everything together to hook me, but the jawbone family tale that's supposed to fill that space left me unimpressed.