Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
In his debut short story collection Night of the Living Rez (2025), Morgan Talty invites us into the world of a Penobscot family with cautious trust. At first, Talty is protective of his characters, reticent with detail about their motivations, interiority and secrets. The first story is the collection’s shortest, a situational glimpse into the protagonist’s night out as he stumbles upon his estranged friend lying unconscious on the snow. These first scenes brim with questions, and a gripping ambiguity as to how these complicated character dynamics developed. Talty’s hesitation with detail thaws across the stories, rewarding the reader for their attention, as we slowly piece together how various decisions and incidents have shaped characters’ lives. Talty’s control over the pace renders it a thrilling read from beginning to end.
He familiarises us best with protagonist David, who we meet throughout his life as an earnest ten-year-old, unsteady fifteen-year-old, directionless twenty-eight-year-old, and several times in between. We encounter David with different names – nicknamed Dee, D, Robbie by his grandmother with dementia or often left unnamed – and each time we gain insights into his experiences of connection and isolation when living on the reservation. The stories chart the rise and fall of his relationships with schoolmates and family members, and his navigation of addiction, loss and trauma. The non-chronological timeline of the stories centre David’s continued battle for belonging amid his environment, whether it be his attempt to emotionally support his mother through her unpredictable moods, find his sister when she disappears or craft an Antiques Roadshow-inspired plan to steal tribal memorabilia with his housemate. Talty’s positioning of the stories also enables him to withhold and share at will, sustaining the magic of the slowly-lifting curtain. The reader is sometimes provided with consequence before cause, or reaction before action – and while this may generate some narrative unsteadiness in the middle of the collection, it ends with a breathtaking payoff.
But Talty’s work cannot be read so simply as a series of questions and answers. He paints a picture which depicts all shades of life in a modern Penobscot community, pairing stories of rupture with repair and methadone withdrawal with familial reconnection. Infusing the stories with mythical creatures from Penobscot folklore, such as pugwagees, Talty builds on his community’s storytelling foundations. Even when retelling fables, Talty leaves us with a sense of incompleteness, commenting, “While we know she cursed those children in that clearing, to forever be little people for their thievery, no one knows what happened to the children she scooped up in her bag.” The structure of his stories follow a similar philosophy – not only are parts of the truth concealed from the reader, but Talty interrogates whether it is known to anybody at all. Here, the characters grapple with the impacts of ongoing colonisation, such that it renders them unable to piece together a chronological understanding of themselves and each other.
Talty nods to the manifold ways in which colonisation impacts the Penobscot community. After smoking a nauseating number of cigarettes, a young David runs to the riverbank and notes, “I was thirsty, but the river was a brown watery grit, filled with poison from the mill up north that sent down wads of pink and shit-colored bubbles that eventually dumped out in Penobscot Bay.” David and his friends are mocked by the characters who live outside the reservation lands. Their methadone maintenance treatment is administered in an inaccessible fashion, and they begin to rely on each others’ reserves. Colonisation permeates all aspects of David’s life, a ghost so present that it does not require explicit acknowledgement. Rather, David asks himself first, “How’d we get here?” and then corrects himself to, “How’d we get out of here?”, aware of the systematic elements which entrap his family. Regardless, David continues to search for meaning and belonging in every interaction with his loved ones and the outside world, balancing his need to prioritise himself while honouring his community. Talty portrays this character with such range and richness, such that, at the end of the twelve stories, David in his many iterations lodges himself into your own world, in all his curiosity and persistence. This is one of the novel’s many gifts.
Ariana Haghighi is an emerging literary critic with proud origins in student journalism, editing student magazine PULP (2022-2023) and student newspaper Honi Soit (2024). In 2024, she chiefly organised the inaugural Student Journalism Conference. She has been published in Meanjin and Overland, and is happiest when reading or underwater.