RATING: 2 STARS
2022; Tin House/Recorded Books

I really hate to rate Night of the Living Rez so low, as I found the writing compelling. I read many of the 4 and 5 star reviews, and I agree how well this story has been written. Talty brings to life what it is like for these characters to be Indigenous (Penobscot) in a "Native community in Maine." Now this is just my opinion as a reader, that this book would have worked better as a novel than stories. These stories were interconnected (having the same characters) but were also moving in time. I, personally, could not say that any of the stories could be read as a standalone. They work together to bring in the context. I did listen to this one on audio, so maybe I lost some of what was happening and did confuse some characters in the beginning, as I was not sure if this was a continuing story or something new. I would definitely read something else by Morgan Talty, but may pass if it is a short story collection.

***I received a complimentary copy of this ebook and audiobook from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.***

Another great read this year from Tin House! I read this book as an audiobook arc, and I really enjoyed it overall. Narration was excellent. I usually like the format of having a series of interconnected short stories, and it's done very well here. The stories are funny, bittersweet, a little supernatural and yet very grounded. They seem as if they would have something to offer readers either with or without insider knowledge of the Penobscot community represented here.

This book was very difficult to read. It's important to have books like this but it's hard to realize people's lives because of others' selfishness. The generational trauma of Native Americans is just so awful.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ by Morgan Talty @morganjtalty

How do you pick up your life after tragedy? How does a people survive collectively with so much shared trauma? How does a family survive the loss of a loved one? How do you keep the demons of the past from swallowing you up?

How do the living come back to life?

Thank you to @netgalley and the publisher @recordedbooks for the audiobook ARC.

Well I genuinely laughed and cried while reading this one which always seems like a good start for a piece of fictional work IMHO. The stories are loosely interconnected and follow David as he navigates life on the reservation as a modern day Native American caught between worlds. David was a complex character full of emotion, passion and intensity. Talty, who grew up on the same Penobscot Indian Reservation in Maine that the stories take place, has a very strong story-telling voice and no doubt infused some of his own experience into this work.

I was enthralled by the characters themselves but also the audiobook narrator, Darrell Dennis (@grinningindian), who captured those characters as unique individuals so well that I needed to know where the stories were going. The stories ebbed from entirely mundane and everyday to tragic and terrifying. The banter between the characters, especially David and his friend Fellis was darkly funny and had an angsty edge that would make Holden Caulfield eat his heart out.

There is also so much love captured between family, community and friends. I am not going to lie to you though, a couple of stories really messed me up and I really did bawl my eyes out. Some because they were so raw and heartwarming, some because they were devastating. The emotion captured in these twelve little stories is absolutely stunning. Get ready for that if you choose to accept this mission.

I am so happy that I picked this netgalley ARC on a whim! I will definitely be looking for more from this author.

If you like short stories, close-knit community settings, dark humor mixed with love and sadness or just want to get a small sensory look into life on a modern reservation, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this one!

This short story collection follows one Penobscot family, non-linearly, over the span of many years, focusing primarily on the experiences of a young man named David. Many of the stories deal with tough topics like drug use, death, poverty, and dementia. The stories address family legacy and inheritance and speak to many uniquely Native experiences.

I would recommend this collection to anyone who likes gritty realistic short stories and is interested in Native American cultures. This is a debut work by Morgan Talty and I look forward to more.

Wow, what a great book. I didn't think I would enjoy the short story format as much as I did, but it left me able to stop and start easily, which is always nice when listening to an audiobook (and the audiobook reading was done well). These short stories follow the same main character throughout time (though the order is not linear), and they all left an impression - in the same story I could go from laughing to crying by the end. Really a beautiful book that I would highly recommend.

I really liked a lot of the individual stories in this book, particularly the titular Night of the Living Rez. That being said, I found a lot of the chapters not interesting or insightful enough. It didn't add up fully as a book, but I do find Morgan Talty to have a strong voice and his writing is of a strong quality. I would be interesting in a novel with one cohesive narrative, but this was only great in specific moments.

I loved this set of stories so much. I love that we get to see the lives of people living on reservations now. Contemporary fiction is a great way to show what life is like now and not only looking into the past. I loved the character development throughout this collection and I'd love to read more from this author.

I received an advance review copy of this audiobook for free from RB Media and NetGalley, and I am leaving my honest review voluntarily as a courtesy.

In 12 rich and vibrant stories, Morgan Talty gives us a glimpse into the life of David, a young boy who comes of age living on a Native reservation of Penobscot peoples in what is now known as Maine. Although sometimes painful to read, these stories weave a tale of the joys and struggles of growing up in an Indigenous community.

I would describe many of these stories as haunting. Morgan Talty's debut novel is moving and eye-opening. As someone who lives in Penobscot County, Maine, I was especially intrigued by these stories. Although I enjoyed the non-chronological approach to telling the stories, I did find myself lost every now and then. I imagine this was because I listened to the audiobook and could not go back as easily as I could have with a physical book. The narration by Darrell Dennis (an Indigenous Canadian comedian) was lovely! It flowed well and I appreciated having an Indigenous voice bring the stories to life.

Overall, I recommend this to anyone interested in stories about Native people and the hurdles they have to overcome in life. I will be checking out the print version to re-read for further appreciation!

In a short story collection - Night of the Living Rez - organized by his main character’s personal chronology, author Morgan Talty, reveals a series of events that show the impact of generational trauma in an evocative and ultimately heart-wrenching manner.

Fiction or nonfiction, across genre and format, one thing I enjoy about most works by BIPOC creators is our ability to craft stories from personal and cultural lenses without ceding space for explanation to the white gaze. In Night of the Living Rez, Talty’s storytelling skills in this aspect are on high display as we move from snapshot to snapshot often without full context until it all comes together in the final chapter.

“Mom had no money, and I knew better than to look. What money she ever came into she blew. Money—it was everywhere but nowhere.”


Over the last few years, I have developed a certain fondness for collections of interlinked short stories, especially when they focus on the same character or various members of the same family. I enjoy the way these collections often ‘disrupt’ the typical linear coming-of-age story, presenting us instead with self-contained stories that hone in on a specific period or moment of a character's life. I like the way they can achieve an almost snap-shot-like quality, one that really brings into focus the emotions and experiences of that specific moment. While here the style is pretty consistent, these collections also have the ability to implement different literary devices and of playing around with perspectives (switching between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd povs). If you like other collections with this type of format (such as Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford, Patricia Engel’s Vida, and Zalika Reid-Benta's Frying Plantain), you should definitely not miss out on Night of the Living Rez. Additionally, if you also happen to appreciate narratives exploring fraught dynamics and dysfunctional families, novels such as Nuclear Family by Joseph Han & Kirstin Valdez Quade's The Five Wounds or memoirs like
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden or Dog Flowers by Danielle Geller, then Morgan Talty's debut should be up your street. Stylistically, thematically and tonally I was reminded of several other contemporary works by Indigenous authors, from David Heska Wanbli Weiden's crime thriller Winter Counts to Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach & Son of a Trickster, which combine magical realism with a coming-of-age narrative.

“You from the rez?” he said.
I didn’t look too Native, and so I said, “Yeah, how’d you know?”
“Your shirt says ‘Native Pride.’”


This collection comprises 12 short stories in which we follow our protagonist, who is a member of the Penobscot Nation and living with his family on a reservation in Maine. In these various stories, we are reunited with our narrator (i believe his name was Dee…?) as a child, a teen, and an adult. In many of these stories we see him, or the people close to him, struggle with dependency and attempt to co-exist (however dysfunctionally) with the rest of his family. Many of these stories are pure funny sad, as Talty perfectly brings together humor with a brutal yet precise exploration of very heavy themes. While I can predict that some readers will be frustrated by the ways the characters fail themselves and each other (falling into ‘bad habits’ or lifestyles, lying to one another about important sh*t, neglecting themselves and others) for me it really hit close to home. It isn’t to cut yourself loose from the people you love or the people who know you, and I appreciated how unjudgemental the author was in portraying his characters’ struggles with addiction etc. Recently-ish I mentioned in another review that I had to return to the city I grew up in because my father had fallen off the wagon big time and had to be hospitalized so, well, there were quite a few scenes that felt painfully familiar. But that’s enough about me. Talty encourages his readers not only to feel ‘sympathy’ towards his characters but to really emphasise them and their respective situations. The dialogues and the way the characters interacted with one another were strikingly realistic, and I appreciated how chaotic and messy some of these scenes were. By presenting us with a humorous yet ultimately haunting family portrait Talty is able to interrogate the way our legacies and inheritances shape us, and the difficulties in trying to reconcile yourself with a past that has left such indelible marks on your present. In this Talty is able to explore boyhood, generational trauma, and the continued injustices faced by Native communities. As I said, I really appreciated how realistic Talty's depiction of addiction and trauma were in that he shows that healing is not a linear or straightforward process. Despite the bleak themes and the depressing scenarios described in these stories, this was not a heavy read. The stuff in here is hard-hitting, sure, but there is this energetic humor that gives a sort of lightness to Dee's narration. Which again makes those painful and sad moments all the more brutal. Another thing worth pointing out is how in certain stories we have this horror-like atmosphere which not only lends authenticity to Dee's 'younger' stories (showing that he is more impressionable) but also reminds us of the horror in the everyday.

Overall, I thought this was a very self-assured debut. The writing is neither distracting nor dull, the dialogues and scenarios are realistically rendered, and the non-linear coming-of-age story was engrossing indeed.

I look forward to revisiting this collection (hopefully when i am in a less stressful period of my life and give it the attention it deserves) and I am curious to read Talty's future work.
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amazing collection of short stories and an incredible debut!! i absolutely loved this. really really loved the audiobook narration.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ by Morgan Talty is a great collection of stories! I loved how they were all interconnected featuring several of the same characters. I loved the exploration of Indigenous experiences and how intergenerational trauma and colonialism has such lasting impact. I loved the touches of humour and the ease of the writing style. Each story flowed effortlessly into the next one and I found myself absorbed into this book. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator Darrell Dennis did a great job! It felt like the authentic voice of the characters. I would love to read Talty’s next book!
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Thank you to Recorded Books via NetGalley for my ALC!

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty is an intimate look into the world of a modern Penobscot family through the eyes of David. Told through a series of twelve, non-chronological short stories, we see an intimate story of a boy coming of age and becoming an adult on a reservation in Maine.

The stories hit every bit of the emotional range and was incredibly well written. David was an incredibly well developed character and I was left feeling like I knew him and his family.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and @netgalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Night of the Living Rez is a collection of short stories that span the young life of a Penobscot boy, David who lives on a reservation in Maine. His age in the story ranges from 12 into his later 20's telling different points in his life. It read more like a novel than short stories and each is very engaging. These stories are not light in topic - they are sad, so be sure you read trigger warners, drugs, money etc. These are not uplifting stories but still ones we need to hear. But there are moments of light in the darkness

thank you to RB Media, Recorded Books for allowing me to listen to this ARC audiobook

I really enjoyed this audiobook! The stories were very interesting, and showed a glimpse into Penobscot life. Some stories were quite funny and others were pretty sad. It gave a nuanced view of the characters' lives without making them into stereotypes. I loved the narrator too, what a great voice!

3.75+ stars

These stories are great, and while they stand alone nicely, they also work quite well as a collection. They deal with a mix of heavy and light topics, probably more of the former than the latter; a lot of the stories deal with substance abuse and trauma in various forms. They’re enjoyable, though, and the writer is clearly talented. It was interesting to see some of the characters appearing is a wide varieties of places and situations. Unfortunately, my attention did wander at times, but I don’t think that’s a significant reflection of the story…in what I know is the opposite pattern for a lot of people, when I’m unfocused, I almost do better with longer stories so that, even when I space out for a little bit, I still know what’s happening; here, if my focus lags, I’ve lost most of a story. Regardless, I did enjoy the book and will likely revisit some of the stories in the future.

Night of the Living Rez
by Morgan Talty

A dark and sad look at the struggles of Reservation families. From the split families, to the drug addicts and other misconceptions. The use of Alcohol as a way of causing distance from pain. The poverty, and abuse of the culture from the government officials. The children have a confusing, unfocused process of raising themselves, between parents not able to spend time with their children because of work, depression, or just a since of loss. Its an endless story of poverty, bad choices, or conflict, the people struggle over their limited options. The layers of old stories give some focus, that is lost in the abuse of alcohol, or drugs.

This was absolutely amazing! I loved that this was a beautifully knit together anthology when some absolutely beautiful story telling. Some stories actually had me in tears they were so well told. I had at least three friends beginning me to read this because I couldn't shut up about it. I plan on keeping up that momentum and make everyone want to read and love this book like me.

I listened to this riveting collection of short stories surrounding a small Native community in Maine. A boy opens a jar, unlocking an old curse, and things spiral out of control. Tales of generational trauma and the modern-day effects of the brutality of colonialism. This book got dark and portrayed a deep pain with stark realism. This book was beautifully put together and definitely gives you a look into a perspective that this country has long tried to erase. Wonderful writing and great audiobook. Thanks to NetGally and the publisher for the ARC!