CREATURES OF THE NIGHT

An orphan is recruited to join a band of sex workers headed into Canada’s beastly north in Davine’s historical horror novel.

A gold rush is on in the Klondike, and men are swarming into the cold mountains of northern Canada. Fourteen-year-old Miss Laura was raised in a Catholic orphanage. She knows Miss Laura isn’t her name; it’s just what the Sisters call her. (Try as she might, she can’t remember the real one.) She flees the orphanage one day after sensing a voice calling to her from beyond the fence. During the night she spends in the woods, she encounters a horrible creature: “Something outside moved. It breathed deep and long through no human nose. Sucking and expelling. So great the creature’s weight that though its footfalls were measured and soft there seemed to be a displacement of the very night the beast moved through.” She’s rescued by a young hunter and ends up in the care of the local constable, who puts her in a jail cell with two other troublesome girls: pretty blond Jennifer and dark, surly Vera. The girls give Miss Laura a new name: Eliza Sky. After a night that features a second encounter with the mysterious beast, the constable releases the three girls into the service of Madam Tigra Volana, a woman who’s recruiting “actresses” for her traveling frontier show. Tigra plans to follow the Yukon River north to the boomtown of Dawson City. “It’s as mean as it gets,” she warns. “Don’t be surprised if you find yourself tricking clients double-time just to keep warm at night.” Keeping warm is only one of many concerns on the hard road north through camps and forests, ending at the abandoned theater Tigra mistakenly purchased in the ghost town of Forty Mile. The characters they meet along the way hold plenty of danger, but not as much as the beast that seems to stalk them—a creature the Indigenous Métis people call the Rougarou, or werewolf.

So much about the novel is promising, including its frosty Yukon setting, its supernatural element, and the frontier culture of gold rush prospectors, suppliers, and sex workers. There’s rarely a moment in which readers’ hairs won’t be standing on end. The book would be much better, though, if Davine were not so stingy with information. Key data—characters’ names and motivations, even the setting—is withheld for many pages, making it difficult for readers to orient themselves within the story. The author’s slippery prose style often leads to confusing syntax: “It touched some nerve near her heart and the girl looked down at the door that had saved her from the yet amorphous nightmare that the very people who had inadvertently fed and watered her might have known better the shape of in their final moments. Better the horror of. The pain.” Even so, the book has much to enjoy, especially for fans of historical horror fiction. Davine has no trouble persuading readers that the realities of the time and place—particularly for women—were just as terror-inducing as any supernatural monster.

An imperfect but inspired horror novel set during the Yukon gold rush.