Ikwo Ntekim’s debut novel begins with a warning: be careful who knows your name. In Where We Go at Night, names carry power, the woods conceal dangerous inhabitants, and the boundary between the ordinary and the supernatural is thinner than seventeen-year-old Trixie Godfrey would like to believe. When her grandfather is murdered on her graduation night, the fae she has spent years avoiding become impossible to ignore.

Raised by her grandfather, Pops, in Woods Crossing, South Carolina, Trixie has always known there is something strange about the woods around her home. Her family possesses the Sight, an ability to see the fae, but Pops has kept her at a distance from their world. His death forces her to confront what she has been taught to fear. Determined to find his killer, Trixie enters a realm governed by rival faerie factions, ancient family conflicts, and alliances that are as dangerous as they are difficult to understand.

But the supernatural world Ntekim creates is not an escape from the problems of the human one. Trixie, the daughter of a Black father and a white mother, occupies an uneasy position in a town shaped by racial divisions and a complicated history. The fae have their own hierarchies and brutal power struggles, and the novel draws unsettling parallels between their world and the society surrounding Trixie. Her search for justice becomes a confrontation with the histories that shape both.

In a review for Lightspeed Magazine, Melissa A. Watkins notes how Ntekim gives equal weight to the realities of South Carolina and the eerie world of faerie, allowing each to illuminate the other. The result is a fantasy that resists easy distinctions between good and evil. Its characters are flawed, its power struggles messy, and its magic carries consequences that cannot always be undone.

Nigerian-born Ntekim received an MFA in creative writing from Stony Brook Southampton, where her fiction appeared in The Southampton Review. A long-time bookseller, she brings her debut novel to a fantasy tradition that uses the supernatural to explore questions of identity, inheritance, and belonging. In Where We Go at Night, the fae are not simply monsters waiting in the woods. They are part of a world whose violence reflects the one Trixie already inhabits.

Here’s the synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Trixie Godfrey has spent years avoiding the fae who inhabit the woods around her South Carolina hometown. But when she witnesses her grandfather’s brutal murder on graduation night, she can no longer ignore her family’s gift of Sight or the supernatural world he tried to keep her away from. Determined to avenge him, Trixie enters the treacherous realm of the fae and becomes entangled in a conflict between rival factions. As she searches for answers, she must navigate dangerous alliances, family secrets, and a history that binds her more closely to this world than she ever imagined.

 

Buy Where We Go At Night here.