Nightjar by Emily Ruskovich is a collection of five short stories, distinctly eerie and beautifully written, with Ruskovich circling questions about knowing and unknowingly keeping secrets from the people closest to you. Each story is a quietly propulsive mystery, with characters often hopping between different times and reevaluating what they believed they already knew to be true.
“Victor’s Room” centers on wife and mother Rebecca, a woman isolated in a remote Oregon farmhouse she agreed to live in for the sake of her husband’s fond childhood memories. Rebecca has been made a stranger to her own life, through common portals of experience like marriage, motherhood, and a career pause, as well as the oddity of the house’s history—as the author puts it, “it hardly mattered anymore where Rebecca was, she could be anywhere, early motherhood a rural place all its own, the winter storms of feeling, the downed power lines of thought.” Left at home caring for her two young daughters, she begins to identify inconsistencies in her husband’s recollections and to spot consistencies in his character she hadn’t previously registered. It’s easy to claim that someone has transformed right under your nose, and harder to admit that you might have always seen and known about these parts and allowed them to go unaddressed.
The Pacific Northwest is a rich setting for these household-centric dramas. Importantly, the farmlands surrounding the houses are part of the households. The roads, the weeds, the trees, the birds, the farm animals, the steep banks, the mountains, and the sky all operate as fundamental components. The firm sense of place contrasts with the more fungible sense of time. Along with the surrealist elements, it makes the stories feel like they might be parables passed along through chatter.
Ruskovich excels at supplying particular character details that immediately give everyone in the story texture and dimension. They feel like people beyond their narrative roles in the story, with depth and history that the reader won’t get to see in this brief foray into their world. Jade’s uncle in “Round Lake” is someone who “wore his hair long not because he liked it long but because he didn’t like making the decision to get it cut.” In “Petty Creek Road,” Will’s younger brother, Butch, was a person who “stacked antique books by the bathroom sink and taped handwritten geological labels on common rocks and who ate ham in ‘no more than two meals’ each day. (He often announced when he was having his hamless meal, as if he felt Will should praise him for it.)” These descriptions make it easy to immediately buy into purported closeness and to empathize with the grief that haunts many of the characters. The author uses a third-person limited perspective for four of the stories and first-person for “Owl,” so the reader is able to glean information not just about the people being described but the character describing them as well.
The first-person narrator of “Owl” is an early 1900s fur trapper who is caring for his wife, who was injured in a bizarre accident in which she was mistakenly shot by a boy in the woods at night who thought she was an owl. As he pieces together exactly what happened that night, he intermittently returns to the cooled cornmeal he feeds the cats that live in the barn. This return to mundanity amidst psychological tension evokes a skittishness similar to watching a jumpscare-filled horror movie.
The precious nature of siblinghood recurs across several of Nightjar’s stories. To have grown up in the same household with the same parents is not a guarantee of emotional closeness, but in many cases, there is forever some inarticulable palimpsest of a shared foundation. Will fails to recognize the necessity of his brother to his life until Butch’s untimely death, outright wondering, “How stupid did you have to be to love someone only once he’s dead?” in the thick of this loss (“Petty Creek Road”). Will thinks about their late father and Cal, his grieving adult son, and realizes that these relationships were mediated by his relationship with Butch. The gravity of his galaxy has shifted with the disappearance of one of the planets.
Tess, the twelve-year-old protagonist of “Nightjar,” acts both maternally and sisterly towards her four-year-old brother Rory. She must feed, protect, and nurture him, this boy terrified of beetles wandering around in blue footsie pajamas. And she also hopes to drag him along on her adventures while being frequently frustrated by his antics. When she discovers that the reflection in the bucket of water for the goats can be extracted as a reflective disc and temporarily preserved, she is thrilled to share this discovery with Rory. As the middle child, she mourns her older brother moving away and comforts her younger brother when he accuses her of abandonment on their school bus route. No wonder she clings to the miracle of a frozen moment.
The nightjar that appears in the story “Nightjar” is a bird caught in the magical reflection of the bucket. Tess and Rory later peer down at the disc, and as the nightjar peers up, “their stares met each other in that moment, as if it were not the future for the bird nor the past for them, but the present for all three.” The effect of this same-named book is not far from this, as the reader and the characters take on what’s in front of them with a similar “almost hostile curiosity.”
FICTION
Nightjar
By Emily Ruskovich
Random House
Published July 07, 2026
