Gabino Iglesias Reviews Clever Creatures of the Night by Samantha Mabry
Clever Creatures of the Night, Samantha Mabry (Algonquin 978-1-61620-897-4, $18.99, 240pp, hc) March 2024. Cover by Kayla E.
Samantha Mabry’s Clever Creatures of the Night is a master class in atmosphere with a literary bent and a few surprising turns up its creepy sleeve. At once a murder mystery, a postapocalyptic narrative, and a story about friendship, this novel about a missing friend and some strange young people living in a house by themselves is as tense and enigmatic as it is entertaining.
Case is a young woman who’s more or less living by herself. She carries a bottle of pills to help her deal with the pain from the damage and scars she got when she almost died during a house fire. When her best friend, Drea, sends her a letter asking her to visit, Case is happy to get to spend time with her friend, who also happens to be the person who was with her on the night of the fire. However, when Case arrives at a dilapidated house in the woods in West Texas, Drea isn’t there. Instead, Case finds Abby, Steph, Kendall, and Troy, Drea’s housemates, and none of them want to talk too much about where Drea went or why. Case decides to wait for her friend, but the strange tension in the house and the way Drea’s housemates behave keep her on edge. When Case starts looking around the house in the kind of spots she and Drea used to hide stuff in in other houses, she finds hidden pages of Drea’s journal. The writing allows Case to piece together a narrative of Drea’s life in the strange house, and she begins to think the housemates murdered her friend. Case wants to get to the bottom of things, but between the caginess of Drea’s housemates, the strange behavior of the animals in the woods, the river rising, the fact that someone took her phone away, and the things she learns from reading Drea’s writing, things get complicated. As the situation deteriorates, Case realizes she could be next.
Mabry is a talented storyteller with a knack for atmosphere and dialogue, and those two elements shine here. Case has a lot of questions and knows something bad happened at the house, but Abby, Steph, Kendall, and Troy are evasive and keeping telling her Drea went to see her mom. Their interactions take place on two planes: the words being said and the hidden meaning of their evasions, silences, and lies. Mabry navigates these conversations, and Case’s thoughts about them, very well. The result is a narrative that becomes tense early on and then keeps getting more and more tense with each chapter.
While this could be considered a postapocalyptic narrative because it takes places after an important event that changed the country, said event – the eruption of a volcano in Austin, Texas – is never really at the center of the story. That might sound like a bad thing, but it’s the opposite. Mabry addresses the event in a few passages and describes how people had to evacuate their homes, the traffic jams and mayhem that ensued, and how things changed due to the smoke and ash that came from the volcano. However, she never fully embraces the gritty, ultraviolent, bleak atmosphere that other novels with similar elements embrace. Instead, she focuses on her characters and allows the eruption and its aftermath to exist in the background while Case’s suspicions and the lingering mental and physical scars of the house fire that almost killed her occupy center stage.
Clever Creatures of the Night is an eerie and very atmospheric narrative that mixes elements of mystery, YA, and horror to deliver a haunting story about friendship and survival that also includes a good amount of violence and a few scenes in which feral hogs and hawks cause a lot of chaos. This fast, entertaining novel will surely please YA readers regardless of their age.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the March 2024 issue of Locus.
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