Here in the Night

The 13 horror shorts in Turkewitz’s harrowing and gorgeous debut collection catalog the small, lonely holes in the world that people fall through—and the ghosts that follow them on the way down. “At This Late Hour” introduces a 30-something employee at a haunted hotel who contrasts her own desire for romantic security and stability with the passion that made the hotel’s purported ghost throw herself into the ocean. “The Attic” finds two teenage girls exploring their romantic feelings for each other as they pack up an attic and together compose the story of the ghost that haunts it. In the eerie flash fiction piece “Warnings,” a high school girls’ track team learns they can’t outrun the dangers adults have warned them about. The standout title story follows a lesbian couple whose car has broken down on a bad stretch of road on the same day as the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., and the two become hyper-aware of the precarity of their situation. Turkewitz’s nimble prose switches on a dime between soft and sharp, poignant and brutal, alien and achingly familiar. At the heart of each story, however, lies tenderness, magnified and made more precious by the dangers that surround it. This is a triumph. (July)