Barrelhouse Reviews: Here in the Night by Rebecca Turkewitz

Reviewed by Nick Fuller Googins

Black Lawrence Press / July 2023 / 150 pp

Here in the Night, on the surface, is a book of scary stories to tell in the dark, hitting every Edgar Allen Poe note that makes New England so perfect for the minor-key scaries: woods, storms, attics, small towns, local legends, rocky coastlines, howls in the night. Rebecca Turkewitz, however, does not merely turn over the same good tropes with her debut collection. She puts them through a contemporary spin cycle that gives the New England Gothic a unique shine. Her characters—almost all young women, many queer—are trying. They are trying to make friends in an unfriendly high school. Trying to figure out what to do after graduation. Trying to grieve the death of a parent. Trying to balance a crush with a friendship. Trying to navigate life in a world that can be a real-life horror story for so many women. Any one of these struggles would lend themselves to solid literary fiction—and they do—but Turkewitz combines these ingredients with the supernatural, making for a spectacular, scary, and unique collection of tales.

This careful combination—the psychologically troubling with the paranormal—debuts in the collection’s opener, “At This Late Hour.” The setting, immediately classic, is the Leavitt Hotel, “one of the most haunted spots in New England,” according to the unnamed narrator, a young woman who convinces the hotel’s manager to let her “haunt” the place. (This narrator is alive.) She runs through the hallways when guests have gone to sleep, she leaves handprints on the windows, she stands in the lawn after midnight with her hands raised. She simply wants to help drum up business, she explains to the manager, but as the story progresses, we glimpse a deeper motive, rooted perhaps in past trauma, and amplified by the ghost of Emily Leavitt, a young bride betrayed on her wedding day. Emily Leavitt, the story goes, leapt off a cliff into the Atlantic. Years later, people can still hear her scream as she hits the cold water.

Local legends like Emily Leavitt are a guiding thread in Here in the Night. In subsequent stories, Turkewitz also introduces us to “Mad Mary Walcott,” the “Webbed-Arm Man,” the “beast-man,” and more. Home-brewed ghost stories like these are the heart of countless good scary times (remember playing Bloody Mary at sleepovers?) as well as the lore of many New England towns. Growing up outside of Boston, we had the “Dover Demon,” a creature with spindly legs that haunted the stone walls near the Charles River. Such stories thrill adults as well as preteens, and Turkewitz deftly brings these new tales into the campfire / sleepover canon. Yet she also employs these legends to explore her characters’ inner lives, weaving a delicate connection between local legends and young women battling their own hauntings, traumas, and betrayals. As the narrator of “At This Late Hour” explains:

Susceptible young women might see Emily’s form floating in the ocean, blue and shivering, beckoning for them to leap in and join her. The legend implies but does not say: Don’t ever join her. The legend implies but does not say: Watch your daughters closely.

The narrator acknowledges the connection she feels with the legend: “Hauntings and history are really just two sides of the same coin, just different ways of using what came before us to make sense of our lives.” She asks, “Why not entertain the idea that, for a few brief moments, the past can spread like a deep soft bruise into the present?” This question is a lodestone of the collection, surfacing in various eerie and fantastical ways throughout, including “The Last Unmapped Story,” which expertly, bone-chillingly echoes the themes and tragedies from the beginning of the book.

Rachel and Hannah are twins living in a small coastal Maine town, when Rachel, at age ten, is struck by lightning. All she remembers from her near-death experience is a vision of a man beckoning her outside; he had a “low throaty voice,” his breath smelled like “damp soil,” and he wore a cape. The cape, however, is not a cape at all: “When he gestured for me to walk in front of him,” Rachel remembers, “I saw that his arm was webbed; a pink flap of flesh ran from his wrist to his waist.” This is the “Webbed-Arm Man,” a terrifying figure that will haunt Rachel into adulthood, as she and her sister take divergent life paths. “I had seen the Webbed-Arm Man, and I knew he was watching from whatever dusky corner of the universe he resided in; I knew that he was waiting.” The story hops between moments of genuine, hair-raising horror and episodes deeply emotional and tragic, as the characters draw closer to that dangerous line where jagged cliff meets swelling ocean.

As urban legends, longtime sleepover practices, and two centuries of Gothic fiction can attest: people enjoy being spooked in a way that feels real and relatable, and, well—doesn’t past trauma influence us all? The thirteen stories of Here in the Night force us to wonder: does our trauma guide us towards the darkness, or could our trauma act as a sort of beacon, inviting—beckoning—the darkness in?

Nick Fuller Googins is the author of the novel The Great Transition (Atria Books). His short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Men’s Health, The Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine, and works as an elementary school teacher. He is a member of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, as well as the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the United States..