Nightjars by Michael Wehunt is a horror novel about the mind, memory, and nasty Appalachian vampires. The blurb for the novel is Memento meets Dracula, which tracks pretty well. Though these vampires aren’t divine, they’re dirty.
The basic plot follows a man who goes on a date, loses time, and then finds a picture of himself as a boy with a dead body and a masked man in the background. Photos keep popping up of a past he doesn’t remember, and then he finds a photo from the present.
The premise feels like a thriller, but the novel is more of a slow burn. You stay in the dark until about 40%, when you finally get some answers, only to be immediately thrown back into the dark. The ending does answer most of my questions, but you spend a good deal of the novel questioning what is going on.
The use of Nightjars/nightjar is a little confusing in the book, as it can refer to a type of person, a place, and an object. So a sentence like, “Are you two nightjars going to the Nightjar to get nightjars?” makes sense within the story. The Nightjar represents a vampire, the place where they slumber, and an object where they store blood.
The novel is about family trauma. Is it in your blood or not? Can you stop passing down the trauma? These are the questions Nightjars seeks to answer.
Nightjars is told from two perspectives. The first is Luke’s for about 40%, then another character takes over until roughly 65%, and from there it becomes a dual perspective. I think the novel would have worked better as a dual perspective from the beginning. But maybe that would have made the novel even slower.
The novel gets off to a slow start, but I found the premise intriguing. Just when I started getting into Luke and his story, the perspective changed, which really hurt the momentum the story was building. The ending gets crazy and is hard to put down, but the novel is more of a slow burn with a pretty decent payoff.
The writing style and word choice reminded me of Stephen Graham Jones. It is beautiful prose that you have to pay attention to. The prose works well for the slower scenes, but when there is action, it can be hard to follow. I kept getting lost in the words.
Nightjars was first published on September 29, 2026, by St. Martin’s Press.
Why did I read Nightjars by Michael Wehunt?
Michael Wehunt has been on my radar for some time. He was primarily a short story writer, but recently started writing novels with last year’s The October Film Haunt, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. I heard he had beautiful prose, and that did not disappoint.
Nightjars was my first Michael Wehunt novel. I received an ARC from St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley.
Plot Summary:
Luke is a small-time bookseller working on putting his life back on track as a former addict. He goes on a date with a woman who flirted with him at the bookstore. The date is going well until she excuses herself to go to the bathroom and never comes back. Luke notices something under her plate. It is an old photograph of Luke as a boy with a dead body and a tall man in a mask behind him.
Luke had a bad relationship with his father and has repressed a lot of memories. He does not remember this photograph or what happened. He starts receiving old photos, always with a body in front of him. He starts losing time, and then he receives a new photo from the present, showing him smiling with a body and blood on his face.
What I Liked:
The prose is beautiful. Wehunt has a big vocabulary and uses words in interesting ways.
I liked and appreciated the way Wehunt set up the broken family dynamic of co-parenting. Luke’s relationship with his little girl and ex-wife is special.
The ending was good, very emotional, and wrapped up the lingering questions I had pretty well.
The crazy reveals about what happened between Luke and his father, and where that relationship ended up, were highlights of the book for me.
I did enjoy the character in the yellow sweater and everything that was revealed about his character.
What I Disliked:
The perspective change was very harsh and happened at a point where it left the reader scratching their head, wondering what just happened. The novel should have been dual perspective from the beginning.
The action was very hard to follow. This seems like a clear weakness for Wehunt. There is one sequence with a character getting whisked away against their will while other things are happening at the same time. I just couldn’t picture that at all, and it threw me out of the novel at an important time.
The pace was a little too slow at times. The pictures were interesting, but the first four Luke received were too similar.
Recommendation:
Nightjars is a little bit of a mixed bag for me. There was more I liked than disliked. The prose and the overall plot were things I really enjoyed. The pacing, perspectives, and action scenes were things I did not enjoy.
I think Michael Wehunt is very talented, and there is enough in Nightjars to make me want to try more of his work. I will give Nightjars a soft recommendation.
Fans of Stephen Graham Jones should definitely check out Nightjars. The similar voices and the way they approach horror are very much alike.
Rating:
Nightjars by Michael Wehunt
3.5 out of 5
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