We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from It Looks Like You in the Dark by Mathilda Zeller, an Indigenous horror debut expertly blending Alaskan Native folklore and supernatural thrills, out from Nightfire on October 13th.
Tapeesa is newly out of high school and working in a fish processing plant in the Inupiat village, Chukchi, where she’s lived her whole life. Maybe that’s why people tend to assume she isn’t that bright—or maybe her mama is right and she does have bad blood. Either way, she knows the legend, and she knows the history. Her Ahna told her that the hungry creature—the kushtuka—appears to us in the form of someone we love. It will try to get us to follow it. Follow it where? Those who have gone no longer have throats to tell us.
The Kobuk River Valley of remote Alaska draws greedy white men time and time again. But whenever they come, death comes too. This time the white men are here for the long term, to create an open pit, a rare earths mine just north of the village. When her sister Esther goes missing, Tapeesa will do anything to get her back. Seeking justice, Tapeesa must track down the kidnapper in the darkening Arctic. What awaits beyond the warmth of her village is more horrible than she could imagine and closer to her than she knows.
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It Looks Like You in the Dark
Mathilda Zeller
Prologue
November 15, 1898
Kobuk River Valley
The darkness came earlier than they were anticipating. The prospectors had been warned by the men who came before them that it was different here, but no one who survived could tell them how different it would be.
Most of the men who came here gave up and left. They listened to the Natives who insisted there was no gold. They took the word of those lying heathens over the testimonials of the river men, the supply vendors, all the God-fearing, hardworking Christians who sold them passage and supplies to get up here. The remaining miners stayed because they knew better. They knew the Natives were lying because they didn’t want to get pushed off their land like their kin down south. They didn’t have the brains to understand that no white man in his right mind would want to live here. The miners didn’t intend to stay forever; of course they didn’t. They just wanted the gold. It wasn’t like the Iñupiat were doing anything with it. Despite their protestations, the miners knew there was gold here. Anyone with eyes could see it.
It was everywhere. It shone in fine grains in the sand on the beach, in paper-fine flecks as it floated with other sediment in the fish-thick waters of the Kobuk River. At night it haunted their dreams in violent, otherworldly streaks across the sky, promising them the riches they knew were here, if they only knew where to look.
Unfortunately, the search was getting harder. The sun didn’t rise until nearly noon and it set well before dinnertime. The hours of sunlight shortened and their kerosene levels fell low. Some of the miners adopted the Natives’ custom of burning seal and whale blubber, but the smell was revolting to them, and the thick oily smoke covered every surface with a sticky black grime.
As supplies ran low, the most determined began to question whether they should stay. They weren’t even allowed to be in the village with the Native heathens; they were forced to camp along banks of the Kobuk River, beyond the warming fires of the community.
The village itself was older than sin—thousands of years old, if the Natives were to be believed—with a name the miners couldn’t pronounce. On a frigid November night, a girl lay under furs, much warmer than the miners. Because her family had lived in this place before sin had entered it, she knew how to stay warm north of the Arctic Circle.
The girl would have been safe and comfortable, except she had a secret growing in her belly, a secret born of violence and fear and a thousand other things. Her mother knew now, knew about the schoolteacher and the growing secret, and she was livid.
From the time her mother found out, something had been haunting the girl out of the corner of her eye. She saw it at the woodpile, and in the graveyard. She swore she saw it in her own home, standing over her as she slept. But how could she have seen it while she was sleeping, unless it was a dream?
It wasn’t her mother. The girl wasn’t certain it was even a person. It appeared more and more frequently, but whenever it came, it was too shadowed, too distant, or too blurred by tears to be seen clearly. The girl hated that she never saw it head-on. She was also afraid to see it head-on.
She decided that this time, as with all the others, it had to be her imagination, or a dream. She decided for the good of the baby she carried, she needed to sleep. She pressed her face into her furs and breathed their comforting scent as she willed her body to relax.
As the girl slept, the northern lights moved like multihued ghosts across the sky over the river. The light was so brilliant it shone through the thin, inadequate tents of the miners and woke them. As they opened their eyes to the strange glow, a shadow passed between them and the lights. A high, melodic sound, like someone whistling, accompanied the light.
There was shuffling and rustling outside, and the men emerged from their tents, guns at the ready. They anticipated a bear, or maybe a disgruntled Native.
There were no bears, and no Natives, but in the green glow of the northern lights, each of them found something outside of their tent.
A hand. A foot. Some guts. A heart.
The miners congregated, their voices rising as they clamored to figure out who or what had done it.
Eventually, they found the head. It was the teacher from the village, throat torn open, his larynx laid bare.
Each man thought of how angry that Native mother had been last week, how she’d come into the camp, shouting words in halting English and rapid Iñupiaq. They couldn’t understand much, but they knew it had to do with the schoolteacher and this woman’s daughter. She wanted them to take the schoolteacher and leave, to go back where they came from. And now, here he was, ripped open before them. They thought of their own interactions with the village girls, the memories feeling heavier than before.
None of them had long to reflect. For the first time in their lives, the guns did them no good. Their words did them no good.
In the morning, the white arctic foxes swarmed the banks of the Kobuk River, their snouts bloody as they picked through tent scraps for their breakfast.
Excerpted from It Looks Like You in the Dark, copyright © 2026 by Mathilda Zeller.
