{"id":7424,"date":"2026-10-01T04:49:56","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T04:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7424"},"modified":"2026-10-01T04:49:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T04:49:56","slug":"nightjars-by-michael-wehunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7424","title":{"rendered":"Nightjars by Michael Wehunt"},"content":{"rendered":"

A woman stands in the aisle of a hardware store outside Atlanta, five months pregnant, deciding between lengths of garden stake. She settles on five of them, two and a half feet long, and adds a rubber mallet, a tool belt, a camping lantern and an ultraviolet torch. Then she straps the belt on and practises pulling a stake from her hip, there in the aisle, under the lights, while a cashier watches her with the beginnings of a smile. She is a poet with one published collection and a lung condition that has frightened her since childhood, and she is about to drive up a mountain. Nightjars by Michael Wehunt<\/strong> spends its first half on a man being framed for murder, and its second half on this woman, and the second half is the reason to bring it to a group.<\/p>\n

What Nightjars by Michael Wehunt Is Doing<\/h2>\n

The setup belongs to Luke Oshel, who owns a secondhand bookshop in Decatur, has been sober a while and is not sure what he did last Tuesday. Photographs start reaching him. Old ones, showing him as a child somewhere he does not remember. New ones, showing him beside women being found dead across the metro area with their blood gone. Each print carries a riddle about a bird, in a hand he does not recognise.<\/p>\n

Behind it is a father. Edwin Oshel drove trucks, drank, and used his son the way some men use a hunting dog, taking him into the north Georgia mountains at night to a cabin he had named. Luke has spent years in a therapist\u2019s office trying to retrieve those trips, and the photographs are doing it faster than the therapy ever did.<\/p>\n

Then, roughly at the midpoint, the novel hands itself to his ex-wife Kristen Meyer and does not take it back. That transfer is the book\u2019s most interesting decision, and a group can spend twenty minutes on it before touching anything else.<\/p>\n

The Rules of the Mountain<\/h2>\n

Horror groups argue about whether the monster holds up, so: this one does.<\/p>\n

The mythology of Nightjars by Michael Wehunt<\/strong> has no sect, no ancient prophecy and no tortured immortal looking for love. There is a hill with something moving inside it, a man who drank from it by accident several centuries ago, and a dwindling supply. Everything else follows from scarcity. The creature made more of its kind to store what it had, the way a household lays down wine, the stored blood has gone bad in them, they are all starving, and so it needs something new.<\/p>\n

The best invention in Nightjars by Michael Wehunt<\/strong> is a kind of mimicry. What these things drink, they can briefly wear, which is how a man with no memory of his weekends ends up looking at photographs of himself. One rule, which explains the entire plot and never needs a page of explaining. The daylight prohibition holds. So does the doorway prohibition, and the novel is amusing about how much comfort that gives the creature. Silver poisons slowly, holy objects are an irritation, and the torch from the hardware store turns out to be worth what it cost.<\/p>\n

There is also a servant, an unpleasant man in a long cardigan who can move about in the afternoon. The book knows which literary ancestor it is borrowing and lets a character say so: this is the Renfield<\/a> role, discussed as a job with terms and conditions, and that discussion is where much of the novel\u2019s cruelty lives.<\/p>\n

What Michael Wehunt Gives Kristen<\/h2>\n

She should not work. On paper she is the imperilled ex-wife of Nightjars by Michael Wehunt<\/strong>, pregnant by a new fianc\u00e9, carrying an illness the plot can switch on whenever it wants a thrill.<\/p>\n

What she gets instead is competence and a temper. She lies to detectives. She drives to the house of a man who once hurt her and knocks on his door anyway. And she finds the thing four officers missed by looking at photographs she took on an impulse. Her breathing is treated as a craft rather than a countdown, a rhythm she was taught as a child and has been using on her poems ever since, and the novel gives her scenes where it steadies rather than fails. She is also the one who must decide, at the end, what to do about somebody she loves, and that decision is the best argument a group will get out of this book.<\/p>\n

Four things give way in Nightjars by Michael Wehunt<\/strong>, and none of them are her.<\/p>\n

The police plot is thin. One detective exists to sneer, obstruct and then feed the monster; the other bends procedure so far for a civilian that the department stops being believable.
\nThe fianc\u00e9 is a function. He is written for two hundred pages as a jealous man ringing detectives behind his partner\u2019s back, then promoted without transition into the man with the shotgun. The jealousy simply stops being mentioned.
\nTwo warm, named relatives exist to be killed. Their deaths are absorbed in a paragraph and barely revisited, which is odd in a novel this attentive to grief elsewhere.
\nThe coincidences pile up in the second half. The decisive clue arrives because somebody idly photographed a hillside, and a reader keeping score will notice how often the plot is rescued by luck.<\/p>\n

For the Group<\/h2>\n

Start with the handover, because Nightjars by Michael Wehunt<\/strong> is built on it. Ask the room whose book this is. Ask whether giving the second half to Kristen is a feminist correction, a rescue of a narrator who had run out of information, or an author admitting he wrote the more interesting character second.<\/p>\n

Then the father. Everything frightening here is inherited: the drinking, the violence, the word in the title, which a man drilled into his son as a name for the pair of them. Ask whether the supernatural plot strengthens that or lets it off the hook. Groups split hard on whether a monster is a good place to put child abuse.<\/p>\n

Then the last twenty pages of Nightjars by Michael Wehunt<\/strong>, and do not read them on the train. A decision gets made about proximity, about how close a damaged person should be allowed to stay to a child who loves him, and the novel declines to tell you whether it is love or a catastrophic mistake. Take a vote. Then ask the quieter question: what the four-year-old at the centre of it would say if anybody asked, and notice what the book does with her voice.<\/p>\n

Content notes: a father who beats his son and forces him, twice, as a young boy, to drink from a woman he has murdered. Women killed and drained, in forensic terms. A recovered memory with a necrophilic charge. Violence against a pregnant woman, including an assault by the throat. A small child taken. A head removed, a jaw pulled off and a wound to an eye, all shown. Alcoholism and relapse. Panicked breathing rendered closely enough to unsettle asthmatic readers. Two sudden family deaths. Firearms. Many wasps. Being buried alive.<\/p>\n

More for the group: The October Film Haunt by Michael Wehunt<\/a> is his first novel and an easier sell to a mixed room, The Southern Book Club\u2019s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix<\/a> is the companion pick if you want a second helping of a woman nobody listens to, In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South<\/a> works if the group would rather stay in the trees, and Sometimes I Scare Myself by Jeneva Rose<\/a> is the fallback for anybody who found this too much at length.<\/p>\n

After the Last Page<\/h2>\n

The thing that lingers is not the cave. It is a half-built dollhouse in a four-year-old\u2019s bedroom, still in pieces because her father kept meaning to finish it, and a small wooden figure of the girl herself that he had made for her and never got round to showing her. That object travels through the whole back half of Nightjars by Michael Wehunt<\/strong>, pocketed, lost, found in the grass, handed over, and every time it appears it costs more than the last time.<\/p>\n

That is the register this novel is actually working in. It has a good monster with a good economic problem, and uses all of it to ask a smaller question: whether a man raised by someone cruel gets to be near his own daughter. Groups that come for the vampires will stay for that. Read it with people who do not mind spending the last half hour disagreeing about somebody\u2019s parenting, because that is where every conversation about this book ends up.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A woman stands in the aisle of a hardware store outside Atlanta, five months pregnant, deciding between lengths of garden stake. She settles on five of them, two and a half feet long, and adds a rubber mallet, a tool belt, a camping lantern and an ultraviolet torch. Then she straps the belt on and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}