Here in the Night: Stories by Rebecca Turkewitz

You’re a reasonable person. You believe in evolution and science and logic. You mostly do not believe in ghosts. … You don’t believe in ghosts because you’re rational, but a rational person considers new evidence.

Rebecca Turkewitz offers thirteen stories in Here in the Night that are all too convincing in their darkness. Women hear voices, are confronted by indignant owls and toothless children, are granted illusions of safety and then abruptly find their certainty guarantees nothing. Ghosts squat in an elevator, wait on railways, and are revealed in lightning. Women are lonely, looking for work, looking for family, comfort, partners, home. One woman remembers keeping a dangerous secret as a teenager. Another wakes up from nightmares to something worse. The stories are set in cities and rural communities once home to an asylum for the criminally insane, the site of a natural gas explosion, and the hometown of a serial killer. Dead mothers and missing fathers, squandered friendships.

A woman considers the attraction of such local legends as witches and children lured to their death. We were proud of our oddities and our hauntings. Just when readers might be forgiven for assuming they know where a story is going, it takes a turn, heading north when we expected it to head south, making us cry when we expected to be laughing, sucking our breath away when we thought we knew what was coming.

There is a beast-man following ten-year-old Lilly, and if she wants to survive, like Lot’s wife she’s not supposed to look behind.

There was debate over what the man would do with your body. Some said he feasted on it. Some said he used victims’ bones to build himself a mansion deep in the woods. Some said he kept the bodies frozen in an underground lair. Some said he took the soul and the body together, and kept them as his servants. Often, the storyteller would present all these sinister options for the listener to consider. …victims would sleepwalk out of their beds to this spot, and awaken only when they heard themselves screaming into the black night.  

But this author looks. And Lilly does too.

The ghosts here are sometimes former partners or parents or suicides, and sometimes they reflect the hauntings in our American society, the injustices generated by hatred and fear. Two women have a flat tire on their way home from a challenging family visit in Georgia. One wants to talk about the 2016 shooting in Orlando. Her partner doesn’t want to give way to that emotion.

I read the article while I was eating breakfast. It upset me so much that I had to throw away the rest of my toast. … a story in the Times about a funeral home in Mississippi that wouldn’t pick up the body of an eighty-year-old man after they found out he was gay…

Mostly I wished I hadn’t read it. It felt so awful to be reminded, before I’d finished my coffee, that there are people in this country who wouldn’t even lay my body to rest.

The women wait for a tow truck in the middle of the night on a country road. Two men in a pickup yell out at them while driving past. Then they return. And, I’ll tell you: they survive this. The author understands readers’ fear and our need to find conclusion. It’s not that simple.

You’re a reasonable person. You believe in evolution and science and logic. You mostly do not believe in ghosts.

Turkewitz explores childhood then jumps forward to nostalgic adulthood, as her characters hope to understand what they cannot leave behind. Sometimes she tells what’s coming and even so, readers are not prepared. Each story ends just before we expect it to end, before we are entirely clear what’s happened, often right at the place we anticipate being slammed with intention and explanation. It is unsettling, but Turkewitz’s intention seems to be to unsettle readers—not to terrify but to inspire uncertainty. Neither what we are seeking nor what we get is what we expect. So we kept silent, tolerating a mystery that allowed both of us to go on living in the worlds we had constructed for ourselves.

Our needs might be revealed by lingering regrets, running away, or bumps in the night. Events from our childhood might still haunt us decades later. The risks include alienating people we genuinely care about.

…Katrina asked me if I was serious about breaking into the shed. It was illegal and senseless. She said I was just being reckless.

But I loved the idea of being reckless. I wanted to be the type of girl who would do anything and who didn’t care what happened to her.

Taking risks might lead to a lifetime of regret. We might look right at what we fear most and discover something precious we didn’t know we wanted. Or we might choose another path. The easier choice begins to look more like wisdom than like settling for less. For the two women in the title story, wisdom comes from quiet, complex lives, which are, on the whole, happier and calmer than either of them expected. Relationships are fraught with risk because they carry us beyond the obvious and hurt us more than we want to admit. Sisters, parents, partners, friends—these stories about ghosts are always about love. I understood, then, that even with all that I had lost, I was not done losing. I understood that I was not done acquiring things worthy of being lost. I understood that love is not a thing that stays buried for long.

---

Jan Priddy earned an MFA in fiction from Pacific University while teaching English in a rural public high school, as well as an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, Arts & Letters fellowship, Pushcart nomination, and publications. Her post-apocalyptic/utopian novel ALL THE DAUGHTERS SING will launch from Ooligan Press in February 2026. Born in Corvallis, she lives in Arch Cape, OR.