Northern Nights, Edited by Michael Kelly

A Short Fiction Review by James M. Fisher

Since I was a kid deep into comics, I've always loved diving into bizarre and spooky horror tales. It started with reading Ripley’s Believe It or Not paperback compilations. I had a whole collection of them. I would take them to the cottage along with my small suitcase of comics to read (and re-read). Besides Batman, I had comics such as Weird War, Strange Tales, The Witching Hour, and black & white comics like Creepy and Eerie. It was an issue of Creepy that was all Edgar Allan Poe stories that got me looking into him. Then on to H. P. Lovecraft. On Saturdays, we had Monster Movie Matinee on TV from across the border.

Of course, the word “horror” may conjure up images like Jason, Freddy and Hannibal Lecter, but this is not the type of horror I like. Strange, weird, speculative, and imaginative stories like I used to enjoy are my preferred cup of tea. So, when I heard of this anthology of “strange stories” by Canadian authors, I was intrigued.

I must begin by saying Northern Nights is a handsome book. The cover illustration (by Serena Malyon), the typeface and the quality of the paper enhanced my reading experience. At just under 300 pages and with 20 stories of various lengths, plus an introduction by the editor, one is getting their money’s worth from this book.

But what about the contents?

Mr. Kelly has done a wonderful job of curating the content. There isn't a lame one in the bunch. The lead story, "Rescue Station", was a little too obvious and probably should have been tucked away a little deeper in the collection. From there on, though, it was a joyride of excellent writing from authors scattered all over the country and with settings from east to west, north to south. There’s even one set in Acadia during the derangement (“The Mi-Carême”) which I was happy to see.

In “In the Gulf, the Night Comes Down” by Siobhan Carroll, young Sami¹ is going on a sailing trip around BC’s Gulf Islands with their best friend’s family. Sami, though is reluctant to go and is full of dread:

You can't make things okay just by pretending they are, Sami thought at their mom. You can’t. Like most of Sami's thoughts, the words lodged in their throat like a ball of spiked glass, neither to be swallowed nor spoken aloud.

Why didn't Sami want to go? The dread rising within them was formless, a cloud over water. They put their hand over their stomach, trying to let the words well up from wherever they were hidden. Because it will be bad, they thought. The sailing trip will be bad.

As usual, they were right.

The trip indeed does go bad. Their friend Alan finds an ancient relic with the power to grant wishes and the voyage goes from bad to worse.

In “The Fragments of an Earlier World” by Camilla Grudova, the setting is “The 1850s or thereabouts, Canada” and three strange cousins from Scotland arrive at the family home of the narrator, whose family is peculiar enough as it is. She has just had a lump removed from behind her ear. Her invalid mother has an infected breast. Her sister Teresa collects dead animals, eats feathers and sleeps not with a doll, but with a toy cast iron stove which she feeds lumps of coal. Throw in three more weird ones and the story is engrossing, to say the least.

“The Breath of Kannask” is a speculative story about the Aurora Borealis (“Old Aybee” it is nicknamed) gone rogue.

“Jane Doe’s Tongue” by Lynn Hutchison Lee is a story about a woman who finds a barely alive woman in a ditch outside her rural home. The narrator begins the story:

People drive up the highway to the dark sky preserve and peer with their telescopes into the black veil of the night. Awed by the mystery, satisfied and safe, they finally get back into their cars and drive home. If you live (as I do, or once did) in this lowland of silent roads and swamps and shadowed forests, that same veil may at any time lower itself over the trees and enter your quiet garden.

At first you may be unaware.

The night draws you into its loop. It walks bebind you as if down a dark hall. You can't get out. There is no beginning, no end Only the coiled dark path like the ouroboros swallowing its own tail.

So many excellent stories in this anthology! Michael Kelly owns Undertow Publications (“We are endearingly weird, and proud of it,” says their website), which produces print and ebooks and Weird Horror Magazine for those that truly enjoy this genre.

Northern Nights is a five-star anthology of strange, weird, and macabre tales. I highly recommend it, and I hope there are more anthologies to come.

"This Whitman's sampler of Canadian horror explores so many subgenres that there's bound to be something here for every reader." -Publishers Weekly

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About the Editor

Michael Kelly is the former Series Editor for the Year's Best Weird Fiction. He’s a World Fantasy Award, Shirley Jackson Award, and British Fantasy Award-winning editor. His fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best New Horror, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, The Dark, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror; and has been previously collected in Scratching the Surface, Undertow & Other Laments, and All the Things We Never See. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Undertow Publications, and editor of Weird Horror magazine.

1. Sami uses the pronouns they/them.