It's a very boring book. I had a hard time following and was unable to finish it. All these words and pages and nothing happened--no plot, no excitement at all. I found the characters unlikeable and did not identify with any of them. Others may find this story intriguing, not me. What story? ( )

Twelve interconnected stories set on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation give episodic glimpses into the childhood and young adulthood of the central character, David, along with his family and friends. A small and sparsely populated area, Indian Island is literally and figuratively isolated, by rivers and poverty and social stagnation. The horror reference of the titular story indeed refers to this latter aspect:

I passed by a large boulder - rolled and placed back when the reservation was a burial ground. Couldn’t tell that to anyone, though, because people talked Pet Sematary. But it was true - this reservation was for the dead.

With not much happening, substance abuse is the main pastime of most of these characters. David and his best friend Fellis get their daily methadone treatments, smoke, and drink. David’s older sister Paige uses heroin. His mom and stepfather drink heavily. These dependencies are treated matter of fact; the characters are treated with humanity.

A frayed but still intact connection to their tribe’s history and identity provides a measure of meaning and creative outlet for the characters. Penobscot mythology and spiritual belief weave through the stories, and David’s stepfather is an occasional medicine man who tries to provide some protection for the family through the ceremonial and ritualistic methods he knows. Whether they do much good outside of providing some sense of purpose is pretty hard to see, of course, and ultimately they can’t save his own body from his pain and addiction.

Coming with cover blurbs from Brandon Hobson and Tommy Orange, among others, this collection introduces a promising young writer from the Native American community. ( )

Powerful collection of short stories spanning the early life of David, a native American living in current times in a reservation in Maine. David and his friends are aimless; they spend their time drinking and smoking and escaping their sad realities. There's mental illness, neglect, poverty and also love. I ached for him. ( )

I've read a lot of indigenous writers, some have hit, some have missed. This unfortunately felt like more of a miss. I didn't take a lot from it and although it's a collection of short stories, they're all about the same characters. That's not bad, but the jump around in times for those characters made it hard to follow what was going on sometimes and took me out of the story. The stories started to feel like there was little variation between each piece, not enough to really make me feel something new with each switch. ( )

The hallways spread out from the main building in every direction like spider legs, except unlike spider legs they crisscrossed and forked and even intersected a few times, open junctions with numerous paths to outpatient services like Mood and Memory. Every worker I encountered was like, “Are you looking for a way out?” It was a stupid question, because each and every hall ended with a red exit sign above double doors that opened to the bright outside as if the place knew how confusing it was. If you got turned around, you could burst through those exits and walk around the sprawling building to the main doors and start over for what it was you were searching for.

That was how mental health therapy worked, I was pretty sure.

One of those ones where I wavered between 3 and 4. Ended up going for a 4 cause the writing is just *really great*, just consistently excellent. And the last story being the emotional gutpunch that tied together the slightly hazy and out of order family story portrayed throughout the rest of the stories also helped.

The criticism that would push it down a little is that most of the stories feel like they cover very similar ground emotionally and thematically and to a certain extent even events wise. There's often a big blur of smoking, drinking, drugs - the repetitive depiction of which takes up a lot of each story. But by the end I came around to feeling the repetitiveness was the point - that circling through the same events, the same destructive patterns over and over with slight variations on a theme was something important for the reader to go through. And as I said it's written excellently. ( )