There are different ways to read 'The Night is Not for You' and I don't believe that Run for It are using the right one in their marketing. Everything about this edition makes it seem like a horror novel that's built on Middle Eastern folklore, which I leapt at. And it really isn't. At heart, it's not really a horror novel and the folkloric angle is distant at best and increasingly peripheral. That's not to say that this isn't worthy, because it emphatically is. It just isn't folk horror.

It's initially about murder. There's one behind a convenience store, perhaps a man murdered by a woman, given abiding scents of ambergris and jasmine, given that his heart was cut out and given that there are words written on his forehead in lipstick. There doesn't seem to be much else to go on and much is kept vague: the location, the time, the victim's name. All we know is that we're in a small town outside a bigger city in a middle eastern nation. Eman Quotah focuses much more on a variety of feelings: blame, hope and fear.

It gets personal in chapter two, when it shifts to the first person and we start to follow Layla, who is only seven years old. The murder doesn't particularly register on her at this point, because she cares far more about wanting a donkey. It's a stylishly written chapter and that continues. These chapters are beautifully crafted, reminding as much of paintings or short films as mere strings of words. When the second murder happens, she goes to school wondering why nobody's around and finds that it's been closed for the day. That she does this entirely unnoticed is truly scary.

Chapter four in particular is an absolute masterclass on grief at multiple levels: a person, a family and a neighbourhood. It's a substantial piece of writing, twice as long as all three chapters before it put together. Never mind folk horror, this is pure literature. No wonder the author's debut won awards. Chapter nine is the most poetic that I've ever read a murder/suicide, outside a writer like James Lee Burke. Did he ever write one? I should check.

The murders add up in this small neighbourhood and get more personal to the characters that we follow. The second victim is the father of Layla's best friend Susu. They move out of their building, as does everyone else, and so it becomes abandoned. Layla and Susu end up going back there and turning its lobby into their lair. Susu makes hundreds of collages to cover the walls. Eventually it's demolished and Susu's family choose to move to the city. The third victim is murdered in a unique fashion, using a motorcycle in his garage. And so it goes.

What I need to underline is that these murders don't come in a flurry. They happen over a rather long period of time, Layla starting the book out at seven but ending it well into her twenties. She even moves to the city at twenty-three and the murders move with her, which might suggest that she was the killer all along but there's absolutely no way that she murdered fully grown men as a girl who hasn't even reached preadolescence yet. That's never a suggestion, but there are other suggestions that grow over time.

One is that these aren't good people. Sure, one of them is Susu's father and she's bitterly hurt by his loss, nursing serious thoughts of revenge against his killer. However, maybe there are details that she isn't aware of, being so young. There are plenty of hints that other victims were abusive and violent or were deserving of their fate for other reasons. Men are rarely seen positively here and one of the most telling lines comes late in the story, after Layla's moved to the city. She tells us that "even men I know are dangerous".

Another is that a murder has serious resonance. We're used to books where someone is killed and the people closest to them are impacted but the world carries on around them regardless. That's often a story point because it seems unfair to those mourning that they be suffering in isolation, as everybody else goes about their day completely oblivious. Here, the first murder has immense impact on the neighbourhood. The corner store moves. The entire community starts to lock down in fear that they might be next. As the murders grow, the neighbourhood becomes suffocated.

I'm sure you're wondering where Middle Eastern folklore comes in and I've avoided mentioning it for effect, because it really isn't that important except on a very high level. Some locals see these murders as falling into the realm of a jinn, who is supposed to live at the bottom of a well. And we do get one incident, a trio of murders, that happens at a well and is immediately blamed on a jinn that must live inside it. In fact, we see it happen and so take that explanation to heart, though it gets defused later when a fake jinn scares Layla at the same well in the periphery of a parade.

I'd love to talk about the ending, because it's so fundamentally important to what the book does and what it tells us, but of course that would be a complete spoiler, so I can't do that. What I can say is that it makes us reevaluate everything that's happened up to this point. It puts everything into an entirely new light and my take on what happens, including the murders and who commits them, requires that spoiler, so there's a ridiculous amount that I just can't talk about. It suggests, though, that we have to read everything as drama rather than horror.

And that brings me right back to my original complaint, which is that it shouldn't be marketed as folk horror. Read this as folk horror and you're likely to be disappointed. Read it instead as a kind of general fiction, written from a very female perspective, and it might just blow you away. Eman Quotah has a poet's command of language and it isn't just restricted to vocabulary. She's able to not just string words into a perfect phrase, but sentences into a perfect paragraph and pages into a perfect chapter. Two of these chapters in isolation could have won awards as short stories. That deserves to be how this is marketed, read and remembered. ~~ Hal C F Astell