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Morgan TaltyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Penobscot are an Indigenous population who have inhabited what is now central Maine for the past 11,000 years. The Penobscot faced dramatic fatality rates through the 16th and 17th centuries as white settler-colonists introduced new diseases and encroached on Penobscot land. Through the late 18th century, the Penobscot ceded the majority of their lands to the US government and were forced to live on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation, which provides the setting for the majority of Night of the Living Rez. In the 1970s, the Penobscot sued the US government because these land claims were in violation of the Nonintercourse Act, which stated that such land transfers had to be approved by Congress. The resulting Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act (referenced in the collection as “the Settlement Act”), gave the tribe a settlement with which they purchased more tribal land.
The Penobscot language, a dialect of Eastern Abenaki, was historically an oral language. The last known fluent speaker of the language died in the 1990s. Efforts have been made to reintroduce the language to Penobscot youth. The written language uses a modified Roman alphabet, with distinct letters added to represent sounds that do not exist in the Roman alphabet. Talty includes an editorial note at the end of the collection to clarify that the spellings of Penobscot words he uses throughout the collection are “a representation of my knowledge of the language” (281), using phonetic spellings rather than the modified Roman alphabet.
The title of the collection, as well as that of its penultimate story, references George A. Romero’s 1968 classic horror film Night of the Living Dead. In the film, the US is overtaken by undead ghouls. The narrative follows a group of survivors in the Pennsylvania countryside who barricade themselves in a farmhouse to escape the onslaught. All the survivors are slowly killed, some even becoming reanimated and killing other survivors. The sole survivor, Ben, emerges from the farmhouse at the end of the film only to be shot by a roving posse of survivors and then burned with the rest of the ghouls.
Night of the Living Dead was a revolutionary film in many ways. Its approach to horror—full of gore and set against the backdrop of a rural American countryside—shifted the imaginative landscape of American horror cinema and provided a jumping-off point for the slashers of the 1970s and 1980s. The bleakness of the film’s ending shocked audiences of the time, who were unacquainted with horror cinema that was both campy and emotionally grim. The casting of Duane Jones, a Black actor, as the film’s main character also surprised some audiences of the 1960s. Monstrosity has long been associated with the societal Other; many scholars and critics read the film as a parable for racial tensions in America through the Civil Rights Movement.
The title story in Talty’s collection evokes images of monstrosity, as the narrator, David, initially believes he’s seen a pugwagee—a monstrous creature from Penobscot folklore—only to learn that the monster is in fact his sister, Paige, crawling through the woods while under the influence of an unnamed drug. Throughout the collection, characters experience altered mental and emotional states that call into question the stability of their identities. David’s mother momentarily forgets who he is after an epileptic seizure. His grandmother, suffering from dementia, mistakes him for her long-dead brother. His mother’s boyfriend sexually assaults his sister. Throughout the collection, trauma itself emerges as the true monster, always lurking just under the surface, ready to burst into the open, rendering characters unrecognizable to themselves and to each other.