Tangled in darkness

Suddenly dropping into a world existing 20 years in the past, and reliving the horror and aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, are among the many personal crises facing Ash in Lauren Carter’s thrilling new novel, The Longest Night.

The Longest Night is Manitoba author Carter’s third novel. Her previous novel, This Has Nothing To Do With You, won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer at the 2020 Manitoba Book Awards. Her work includes a short-story collection and two poetry collections. Carter founded Wild Ground Writing Retreats and has facilitated and led creative writing workshops online and in person.

The Longest Night opens in 2021, with a harrowing scene in which 18-year-old Ashley (Ash) Hayes, having fled her parents’ incessant fighting, is locked out of her family home in rural Minnesota in the middle of a 40-below late December night. Not properly dressed for the extreme cold, when Ash realizes she can’t get back into her house, she knows she must find shelter quickly before hypothermia sets in. Led by what might be an imaginary red fox, Ash runs to a neighbour’s house, ringing the doorbell and then losing consciousness.

When she awakens, she finds herself in bed, naked, with her right hand bandaged. She doesn’t recognize the messy room she’s in or the white cat watching her. Exploring the house, she meets Lucille, who persuades Ash to drink a cup of tea which Ash finds unusually delicious. Having left her cellphone at home, Ash uses the flip phone that Lucille gives her to call her parents but just gets a recording. She talks about going home, but Lucille stops her, saying the doctor who saved Ash’s life wants to meet her.

The doctor is a tall man with bright blue eyes that hypnotize Ash. When he cuts off the bandage on her hand, she sees her little finger has been amputated. The doctor says it was frozen solid, so he had no choice but to remove it.

As time passes in the strange household, Ash becomes more disoriented, drinking the tea that Lucille gives her and gradually forgetting her past life. She can’t tell whether it’s night or day, and the long winter night seems to be endless. Drugged and alternating between nausea and extreme fatigue, Ash struggles to focus on escape plans, which Carter conveys in edgy prose. However, when she learns of the doctor’s plan to impregnate her so she can give him a son, she summons enough strength to run out of the house.

Flagging down a van, Ash asks to be taken to the police station. She recognizes many of the people around her, but they don’t seem to know her, and everything seems out of sync. On a TV in the station, the first plane is shown flying into New York’s twin towers, and Ash is stunned to realize she’s living 20 years in the past.

Following seemingly random pieces of advice that her grandmother gave her throughout her childhood, plus using her rudimentary knowledge of time travel gained primarily through books and movies, Ash tries to figure out how she can return to her life in 2021. She’s aware she has the opportunity to change her personal history, saving her infant brother’s life and preventing a close friend from dying by suicide 20 years in the future.

But she also knows meddling in the past could have terrible unforeseen consequences. Despite the risk involved, she seeks her grandmother’s help to figure out how to take away the doctor’s power and reclaim her true life.

With evocative prose, Carter manages to cleverly entwine overlapping stories of Ash, her family and friends to create parallel worlds set 20 years apart. She’s able to aptly combine these elements to create a compelling story with surprising twists.

Andrea Geary is a freelance writer and editor in Selkirk.

Lauren Carter launches The Longest Night on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, where she’ll be joined in conversation by Seyward Goodhand.