Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, graphic violence, death, and child abuse. 

In many of the short stories in Never Whistle at Night, the gap between the historical and modern worlds is the source of horror. Most of the stories’ characters live in and maneuver through a contemporary society shaped by Western colonialism. Nevertheless, they face mythical or otherwise traditionally Indigenous figures and conflicts, the resulting dissonance often bolstering the stories’ tension and atmosphere. 

In “Kushtuka,” for example, Tapeesa encounters a kushtuka, a shape-shifting spirit, and must confront a skewed mirror image: “A figure stood before us in the headlights […] she was me. Or would have been, were it not for the pupils that covered the whole of her eyes, and the hideous, obscenely wide grin that distorted the lower half of her face” (9). The kushtuka looks like Tapeesa and is committed to killing Hank, his friends, and his son as revenge for their theft of Inuit cultural objects, their invasive mining operation, and their violence against Inuit people. However, if the mystical spirit is the ostensible source of the story’s horror, the fact that it becomes a manifestation of Tapeesa’s rage against Hank and the other men implies that the true horror lies not in the kushtuka but in the depredations of Western modernity.