Night of the Living Rez

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2022

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“Night of the Living Rez”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Night of the Living Rez” Summary

After spending time with his father, David returns to the reservation to find that his mother is annoyed at both Paige and Frick—his sister because she’s “gone wacko” (230) and now believes in zombies and is often missing from home, and Frick because he’s “been weird” (231) for the past few weeks, sleepwalking and talking about the arrival of Jesuits. David heads out to meet JP and Tyson, who believe that they’ve seen a pugwagee—a cursed mythological being—in the forest. While out hunting the pugwagee that night, they find Paige crawling through the forest, too high to recognize David. He follows her home and sees her crawl into the shed and sleep there.

David doesn’t see Paige again for the next few days. Later that week, after coming home from hanging out with JP and Tyson, David finds Paige in their mother’s bed screaming, with Frick, who has taken Ambien, on top of her, trying to take off her clothes. David helps get Frick off of her, and Paige repeatedly hits Frick over the head with a poker from the fireplace. Their mother returns home, and Paige and David plead with her not to enter the house. When their mother does see what’s happened, she holds both of her children close.

“Night of the Living Rez” Analysis

“Night of the Living Rez”—as suggested by the title’s tongue-in-cheek reference to George Romero’s 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead—examines monstrosity from several different angles. JP and Tyson’s conflation of Paige and the fictional pugwagee associates Paige with the cursed, doomed mythology of the pugwagee. Paige’s movement through the forest certainly has monstrous aspects from the boys’ point of view. Before he learns the creature’s identity, David refers to it as “the body,” using the impersonal pronoun “it.” In the moment before they recognize her, Paige is genderless, inhuman, and frightening. Paige is so altered by drugs that she can’t recognize her brother and is reduced to crawling through the forest. Paige is only “monstrous” to David in that she’s rendered unrecognizable by her substance dependency; when he finally recognizes her, his attitude shifts.

Frick’s masculinity has threatened David at many points through David’s life: Frick has often made David feel inferior, and before this story has even physically threatened both David and his mother. In “Night of the Living Rez,” Frick becomes his most monstrous, assaulting Paige. Frick’s confrontation with Paige and David after the assault grotesquely mirrors the final moments of a slasher film: Frick approaches them “slowly, bumping into the wall and rubbing his fingers together” (252) and Paige, in the model of the slasher’s Final Girl, arms herself in order to put an end to the monstrosity. David ends up covered in his own blood, and both he and his sister exit the house in traumatized terror. These references to the horror genre associate Frick’s Violence as an Expression of Masculinity with a monstrosity that is dangerous and in need of confrontation.