Not to be confused with Night Watch (Discworld #29) by Terry Pratchett.

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024, which was how it caught my attention as a giant doorstop of a hardcover book. Then it caught my attention again when it went to paperback, because what the heck?—it was like a quarter of the size. (Seriously, it was so dramatic.) I have been trying to read the big-award-winning books since 2024, so I was happy to put this “new to paperback” title on the book club list at the bookstore. We (and I) read it for our February meet.

Apparently Phillips, a literary/historical fiction writer, has written some other notable books, she just hadn’t been on my radar. (Or maybe I had heard of Machine Dreams?) She’s from a small town in West Virginia (which is where this book takes place, but around the time of the Civil War) and went to Iowa (the top-notch creative writing program in America). She’s done a lot of teaching creative writing in some prestigious programs. Her short stories have won some fancy awards, like the Pushcart. It looks like her trademarks are “a rush of” language, and kinda bummer loner survival stories. When she transitioned to novels, she also won some awards for those, working her way up to that Pulitzer.

Her works are:

• Sweethearts (short stories)
• Counting (short stories)
• Black Tickets (short stories)
• How Mickey Made It (short stories)
• The Secret Country (short stories)
• Machine Dreams (novel)
• Fast Lanes (short stories)
• Shelter (novel)
• MotherKind (novel)
• Lark and Termite (novel)
• Quiet Dell (novel)
• Night Watch (novel)

Her much-anticipated memoir, Small Town Girls, is dropping this May.

Blurb: The Civil War has been raging in the border states, leaving the women and children tucked away in the solitary mountains alone and vulnerable. ConaLee was born months after her father enlisted and disappeared, and ten years later she’s living a lucid nightmare raising three babies with a mother who won’t speak and barely interacts, a brutal and strange man who calls himself Papa, and all other ties to the world cut off completely, before she is dumped on the lawn of an enormous insane asylum with a story of a false past. Could the stories we tell create a future that is worth surviving for?

Ya know, the cover of Night Watch is a little whimsical (especially the one with a lavendar wash), a little buoyant. While I would say at times the book has a strange levity, overall this is a bummer of a book. I had also made a 2026 goal not to read any books with rape in them, since last year I kept bumbling into outstanding books that were chock full of sexual assault (and murder). I just need a break! This one? Has some of the creepiest and most explicit rape scenes I have ever encountered. But I didn’t know it was coming. And then I was in it. And the incidents create the situation that the main characters are in; it had to be real bad, and it was. I guess that makes this a content warning, one that I could have used during my rape-scene-free-year, which has so far led to two out of six rape-y books in January. (The other is Adam Johnson’s The Wayfinder, which I am not done with yet.) Sigh.

Overall, I’m gonna say Night Watch is a great book. I don’t really understand the angry, low-star reviews online. It seems to me the people complaining are people who don’t read or enjoy literary fiction. Okay, then. But this is clearly literary fiction (but with some genres sprinkled in), so it should be a little experimental and the word acrobatics should be flying and the language dense. I will admit that now and again (maybe every 50 pages), Phillips’ language was so opaque and her choices so poetic that the meaning was obscured. On page 253 there is a whole paragraph that I re-read several times before giving up, assuming it was either metaphorical or I was going to figure it out later. (It was the second.)

Which leads me to genre-play with this short, historical/literary novel. There is plenty of mystery. The structure of the book is meant to create these mysteries with much withholding of information and careful flashback. (Although the big mystery that becomes intriguing about mid-book was revealed entirely too quickly.) The main part of the narrative is back-and-forth sections between 1874 (after the Civil War) and 1864 (during the Civil War), with occasional flashbacks to before. These sections are mostly linear, but sometimes a day or a week loops back so that we see the time from someone else’s perspective. There are at least seven POV characters who use a combination of first and third-person: ConaLee, Dearbhla, the Sharpshooter, Eliza, Weed, and O’Shea, even Dr. Story at the end. Names can be confusing here, as they overlap and change and that is part of the mystery, but the chapters were clearly marked as to whose perspective it was, which I appreciated. No quotation marks, which I found acceptable after all the Irish novel I read in the past two years, but some readers hated on that that, too. I get it.

I would also call this book horror. There are some scenes that are not just horrifying, but also creepy and sometimes even slasher. Those scenes played out in my head just like I was watching a horror movie, and then the cold, sinking creepiness carried, the book full of things like asylum wards, rifles and bone shivs, dark forests, small objects like birds’ eggs and tiny mirrors. But there is also a fairy tale aspect to all of it. I suppose if we take it back to the old fairy tales, there were horror elements already built in.

I was very surprised to see Phillips pull a Ransom Riggs thing here with the historical photos. For those of you who don’t know, Riggs wrote Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children, etc., which is a YA fantasy series that was constructed from his vintage photo collection. In his series, real photos become characters and scenes in his narrative. Yes, Phillips also does this in Night Watch. I figured the photos would just help us get the context and vibes, but she also writes the photos (and maps and drawings) directly into her story. It felt a little cheesy, and yet I acknowledge that she did it about 600 times better than Riggs did. (Sorry, Riggs.) Overall, I appreciate the well-placed photos and historical quotes because they did help with vibes and understanding and I would pay good money for the list on page 172 of “Reasons for Admission [to a hospital for the insane], 1864-1889.” It was endlessly interesting to me, both humorous and chilling. And mystifying.

Note: according to the Acknowledgements, the asylum featured in the second half of the book has been restored and is open to the public. It would be cool to go see it, for sure.

Overall, I really liked this book. Because of the occasional confusing writing and the odd fit of some components together, I wouldn’t give it five stars, but it’s close (for me). I liked the mash-up of things, the playing with literary style with other genres and also, well, just general playfulness (not in the story, but in the storytelling). I was surprised here and there (which I love to be) and also was kept wondering what was going to happen next. There is a lot of weaving together (which though I love that, is one thing that felt a little ill-fitting here) and plenty of juicy characters and subplots to follow. It is immersive in setting, immersive in history. It took me a hot minute to read because of the density of the writing style, but the story itself kinda flies by (despite the brutality and the tension). I am curious to see at book club if anyone read it fast. (It is only 276 pages.)

Yes, I would recommend it. I hate to be all content-warning about it, but the sexual assault scenes are brutal and so very disturbing. The rest of the book is fascinating, though, and tells an engaging story about an engaging place and engaging people, if many things are a little bleak. (Theme: war tears some sh** up!) The historical charts really drive home how vulnerable women were at the time (especially in the face of entitled men) and I felt so hard for this girl and her mother and all the other women. There are lines of hope in this book, unlike some of the other bleak titles I have loved in the past two years, but there are tough, universal realities to reckon with, as well. And I thought it was beautifully told.

“It is among the most painful features of insanity, that in its treatment, so many are compelled to leave their families” (p3, from Thomas Kirkbride’s book).

“The Secessionists lost, I knew, and the Abolitionists won, but they were all ragged, drifting men” (p8).

“Not conjure, she would say, but thought that sees between” (p40).

“Nothing is truly surprising now, said O’Shea” (p107).

“Our lives are small, our victories smaller. That is the sort of thing I say that my good wife cannot abide” (p119).

“Many can be cured with humane treatment, and the incurable, treated humanely” (p150).

“…it was your story, told so well that now it’s as true as any other” (p202).

“ConaLee, there is no forever. We are on our walk and the day is fine. Tou must think… each day is separate, until a way is clear: (p204).

“War scars last. Generations…” (p206).

“Air is a tonic, my Weed, see that ye remember” (p217).

“But Dr. Story, surely a just society must respect any woman. It is moral treatment, isn’t it? / He’d agreed that it was, though they might never see such a world” (p219).

“Gratitude for one’s survival, Story believes, lasts even longer than love” (p223).

“So many of our patients, all classes of society, find themselves sole survivors, nine years on, of our–national catastrophe. / It is still un-spooling, O’Shea said, like malignant thread” (p235).

“They are still fighting the War in some of these towns, settling scores. / The first is only banked…” (p236).

“Endurance was strength” (p276).