On After Dark

This is a beautiful short novella. I went in with no expectations, and I’m glad of it.

The whole story unfolds over seven hours, midnight to seven in the morning, following a small cast across the night. What most of the characters experience reflects a strong sense of community and care — the kind I remember coming across late at night in university. There are bleak moments, but their weight is held at bay by the humanism of the characters. The surreal turns up too, without predominating, and it adds a great deal: late at night things don’t always feel right, and the surreal feeds that.

The point of view does a lot of the work. The narrator, and the vantage itself, has nearly anthropomorphic qualities, and the whole thing is told in the present tense — the narrator learns what happens at the same moment we do, which gives it a kind of meta-commentary. In places it reads more like a screenplay than a novel, and that voice adds to the strangeness and wonder. My only regret is that the book is so short — though I also think it was exactly as long as it needed to be.