These tales of things that go bump in the night also pay tribute to the Choctaws’ preservation of their culture.
A chilling collection of stories about the tricksters and other beings of Choctaw lore who refuse to be forgotten.
When homicide detective Monique Blue Hawk thinks she’s encountering a deer in “Kashehotapolo: The Deer Man,” she makes a startling discovery: “It stepped into the clearing. Her jaw dropped. She looked lower and with a start realized that the buck did not have a deer head. She saw an old man’s face, furred like a deer, wrinkled and passive.” Kashehotapolo is one of the entities in the Choctaw pantheon, and Choctaw historian and writer Mihesuah explores the interactions of humans with these various beings in tales blending folklore with ghost stories, detective fiction, and other genres. Some are set in the years before and after the Chahtas, or Choctaws, were forced to leave their homelands and migrate west in the 1830s. Mihesuah explains in a note how the supernatural creatures in their belief system followed them west, too. Some, like the shampe—a version of Bigfoot—seem frightening but are harmless, while others are truly menacing. That includes the shape-shifting Elus Crow in “The Cornfield,” a story that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Stephen King collection. Alive for centuries, Crow, who’s an evil opa, or horned owl, preys on lost travelers who come upon his remote farm. His “helpful” directions to the main road always send them into one of his witch holes, the perfect place to keep them until he’s ready for his next meal. Some creatures, like the Little People, seem motivated more by mischief than malevolence. Others demonstrate a desire to protect Choctaw heritage, as one unfortunate young professor learns in “Tenure” after falsely claiming Choctaw lineage to further his academic career. The author’s years of research richly inform these tales, and she keeps the superlatives to a minimum—her subject matter is fantastic enough without them. Surprisingly, many of these stories resolve in satisfying ways, if not with an outright happy ending, and the author says in an introduction that “composing fictional stories about real-life histories allows me to create the endings that I want to see, and the act of facing scary cosmological creatures with a keyboard also gives me some control over what I fear.”
These tales of things that go bump in the night also pay tribute to the Choctaws’ preservation of their culture.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780806194677
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.
A relationship between young screen actors is magical, fraught, and relentlessly public in Green’s first novel for adults.
“Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.” In the off-screen romance between actors Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie, the obstacle is a moving target. Juniper notices early on that as flirty and forward as Kai is, he seems “closed off to a romantic connection”; that turns out to be the tip of a very problematic iceberg. The two meet in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel where they will be spending the evening with Matthew Malone, the megastar playing Andy Warhol in a movie they’re about to begin shooting, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Kai has been cast as Andy’s intern, Juniper as a journalist who gets in over her head. This is Juniper’s first adult role after a long run as a Nickelodeon child star, and newcomer Kai’s first role of any kind. Green evokes in compelling detail all the phases and aspects of the film project, from the table read to the screening of the rough cut, from the social media fanfare to the public premiere and the press junket, moving back and forth between Juniper’s and Kai’s first-person perspectives. In a meeting with one of the ubiquitous publicists, Kai learns that somehow “the high school stuff” he never talks about—despite their growing inseparability and seemingly profound connection, he hasn’t even brought himself to share it with Juniper—has surfaced. Details emerge slowly, then blow up in the media; the book’s third act focuses on the destructive potential of celebrity culture in a climate that makes Warhol’s milieu look innocent by comparison. After a long break from writing fiction—his last two books were Everything Is Tuberculosis (2025) and The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)—Green fills this novel with carefully observed details of Hollywood culture and characters, including running jokes about vegan cuisine, media training, and the way Kai’s agent constantly and boorishly consults his young female assistant on points of political correctness. Can he talk about “hot girls”? Can he quote T.S. Eliot? OK to say “dog vomit”?
A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9780525426073
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
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