The book opens with a horrific stabbing in the woods at night, a murder that works more to establish a dark, tragic tone than to set up any real mystery that needs to be solved ... By turns cynical and plain-spoken, Staples is a guide with inside knowledge about the lives he depicts. Despite his occasionally clunky and disjointed prose, he makes a clear-eyed and distinctive debut.

Staples renders Marion in the first-person, giving the reader a vibrant intimacy to an openly gay man in a town where the majority of nearby online dating profiles are blank. The concise, thoughtful style gives characters, even when hardly physically described, emotional propulsion. Staples’ empathy for the entire town makes the characters clear and urgent. The author’s empathy even extends to former prom king Shannon Harstad, Marion’s childhood bully who becomes his on-off closeted lover ... It’s fair to say that Shannon doesn’t know himself, a sad and pressurized state that Staples pushes into relief by skillfully writing Shannon’s sections in the second person. There’s a beauty to the unadorned prose ... Staples avoids melodrama in detailing the drug vulnerability, emotional strains, and the financial frustration that befalls the denizens of Geshig. This troubled reality does come with a good share of humor ... This Town Sleeps is suffused with such humanity and the voices are so enchanting that a longer novel, to allow for a plurality of perspectives, might have been warranted. But this is a comment about expansion. The narrative is so well controlled that, however brief, This Town Sleeps remains a consistent pleasure.

There is a story worth telling somewhere in This Town Sleeps, but it gets lost amid endless hookups between unlikable characters and a narrative arc that resembles the trajectory of the ball in a game of frat-house Beer Pong played by freshmen pledges one errant bounce away from puking into a nearby potted palm ... Maybe This Town Sleeps aspires to be a book without sympathy: an unflinching look at the pain of reservation life...But in this era of #MeToo, readers may search in a novel like this — filled with off-putting characters — for the tiniest glint of awareness or redemption.Unfortunately, they won’t find it.

... haunting ... The perspective slides from Marion’s first person to Shannon’s second to a third that encompasses individual memories and community knowledge. There are moments where this is useful ... But the loss of Marion’s charm and immediacy mean that these shifts in subjectivity derail the narrative, leaving the reader to re-orient, chapter by chapter. The accompanying shifts in time nearly create a structural haunting ... Staples’ novel feels a little unpolished. But this is Staples’ first book, and there’s a deep pleasure in watching him find his voice in it ... How much does the audience know, or need to know? Who is represented? How fairly? Here, Staples shines. He weaves the quiet threads of spiritual life with the day-to-day activities of a modern community. There isn’t a single way to be Indian here ... In spite of the novel’s weaknesses, This Town Sleeps is genuinely enjoyable.

This dreamlike debut reveals the memories and stories of Marion, Kaydan, and a number of women with legendary tales of losing the men in their lives. Those generational influences turn women into alcoholics and addicts who abandon their children in a haunted town ... With its multiple narrators and stories of ghosts, this debut will find its audience in those searching for #ownvoices authors with an authentic view of reservation life and the tragedies that haunt the communities.

Plotwise, the story is a stock hero’s-journey tale, as Marion lets go of his skepticism of Ojibwe spiritualism, discovers the truth about Kayden’s death, and finds a community along with a degree of emotional fulfillment. But credit Staples for complicating the story in some interesting ways, from shifting perspectives from Marion to other townspeople (with a particular emphasis on Native women), a smirking humor that cuts the mordant atmosphere, and a graceful handling of Ojibwe culture. In its later stages, the story seems to keep sprouting tentacles as new characters and revelations emerge, which saps some of its narrative drive, but it returns affectingly to the messy fates of Marion and Shannon ... A knotty portrait of Ojibwe life with some winningly uncanny touches.

Staples’ first novel is an arresting look at the intersection of past and present. Himself an Ojibwe, Staples writes with authority about his characters and setting. If his novel has a failing, it is that his female characters are often little more than names, leading to confusion in the flashbacks, but otherwise this is an auspicious debut with a memorable protagonist.

... promising but slack ... The novel’s two strands, the desultory mystery and the romance, never fully gel, and neither generates quite enough suspense or emotional resonance. Staples, though, can be marvelously funny and there are evocative tableaus of life in Geshig. This offers tantalizing glimpses of talent with a steady hand on mystical material.