Laughter attends our gravest rites. In Morgan Talty’s book, David, a child and citizen of the Penobscot Nation, arrives at his new house and finds a curious object beneath the stairs: ‘a glass jar filled with hair and corn and teeth’. He recognises it as a curse, something intended to hurt his family. His mother calls her boyfriend, Frick, an alcoholic medicine man, and asks him to cleanse the house. The ceremony suffers an all-too-human hiccup – Frick trips over a root and drops the smoking sage he is carrying. Ritual becomes pratfall, the sacred giving way to the profane: ‘“Shit,” he said. I laughed, and Mom let out a sharp shush and I shut up.’ 

Night of the Living Rez comprises a sequence of short stories centred around David’s life on a reservation in Maine. It is a trauma zone: the ‘skeejins’ (citizens of the Penobscot Nation) are pursued by ‘Goog’ooks’ (evil spirits); violence is rife; drug and alcohol dependency abounds. Children are loved and neglected in equal measure. Enough cigarettes are smoked that the reader may feel in danger of nicotine poisoning. Caught between indigenous and colonised worlds, David is forever out of place. ‘I had nowhere to go,’ he says at one point, ‘but I ran like I did.’ 

The book walks a fine line between tragedy and bathos. Sage smoke makes David cough, a protective deer-hide pouch makes him itch and he develops a methadone addiction, making him ineligible to participate in peyote ceremonies. Elsewhere, an anonymous congregant farts in church, and a teenage drug addict passes out,