Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Wait for Night

4.5 stars for this suspenseful Tor.com story, a 2021 Locus Award finalist. Free to read online here at Tor.com. Final review, first posted on FantasyLiterature.com:

Chessup is a day laborer working as part of a crew outside of Boulder, Colorado, helping to clean up a creek that was filled with trash in the aftermath of a flood. At the end of the day, looking to borrow a battery from the crew’s bulldozer to jumpstart his old car, Chessup finds something very old tangled up in the roots of a tree that the bulldozer had pulled down.

With visions of selling his discovery to a pawnbroker for cash, Chessup sets about removing it from the tangle of tree roots. He’s about to leave when his co-worker Burned Dan, who wears a bandanna over his face like a train robber, confronts him and demands that Chessup sell his find to Dan instead. But darkness is beginning to fall, and it may be too late for both of them …

Stephen Graham Jones’ “Wait for Night,” a Locus finalist short story, weaves a familiar mythology into an unusual setting. A pair of world-weary, down-on-their-luck workers are the main characters, and Jones’ depiction of Chessup’s character and his world is stellar.

Thirty minutes later, that five o’clock whistle blowing a couple hours late, my uncle’s unregistered Buick fell into its usual routine of refusing to start, and I was the only one still parked in the pullout. I sloped back down to the creek to splash my face, consider my life, and all the decisions I’d made to get me to this point.

The characterization remains true even as Chessup finds himself in an intense life-and-death situation, faced with choices he never thought he’d be required to make. Burned Dan is equally interesting, making seemingly off-hand comments earlier in the story whose true import becomes all too clear later on. It’s exceptional storytelling, with so much going on between the lines.