Here in the Night

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.

At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe—at least fleetingly—that anything could happen.

Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of the story collection, Here in the Night (2023). Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Normal School, The Masters Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, The New Yorker’ s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University.