Reviewed by Micah Dean Hicks
A collection of fables and magical tales, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day is Ben Loory's first book. It includes forty brief stories and spans about two hundred pages. The last story in the collection, “The TV,” appeared in The New Yorker last April.
Though many of these pieces would qualify as flash fiction—they average just a few pages—Loory's stories follow an older form. At times, they have the feel of Hans Christian Andersen's work, if Andersen had lived in a time with UFO and Bigfoot sightings, concrete swimming pools, and television. “The Man Who Went to China” begins with the line, “Once upon a time, a man went to China. Then, later on, he came back. This was at a time when people didn't go to China—it was a strange place, and far away, like something in a book.” The language is simple, but it is the language of story itself--things happen once upon a time and far away. The characters often have no names, and are referred to only as "the man," "the boy," or "the girl."
Loory's work has a Spartan approach to detail, and employs the device of Chekhov's gun: if a detail is invoked early in the story, you can guarantee that it will be used to full effect. In the first line of “The Octopus,” the main character—who is an octopus, of course—is stirring his tea with a spoon. The story takes this object and builds the octopus's character around it. He is a collector of spoons, laying them out and polishing them, his entire association to the world outside the ocean distilled into his relationship with these objects. Nothing is extraneous here.
Readers who don't often read fairy tales may be thrown by the fabulist logic in these stories. In "The Duck," a stone pushed off a cliff becomes a bird and flies away. But these pieces do not feel random. After reading a number of them, readers will find that they can internalize the logic of the collection, sometimes anticipating the outcome of a story. But in the best of them, Loory's tales still manage to surprise in a way that feels right. Readers will not feel cheated when the story takes them somewhere they could not have expected, because even if we didn't see it coming, Loory persuades us that this is exactly the way it should have happened.
At a time when much contemporary fiction is cynical, overly academic, or preoccupied with realism, we may forget that stories have historically focused on the exceptional rather than the mundane. In this, Loory's work stands out. His fiction is sincere and filled with emotion. His stories are about people and their experiences. Most importantly, they are full of wonder.
While Central and South America have a strong tradition of fabulists, writers of magical realism, and folktale authors, North American writing has historically been dominated by realist fiction. Ben Loory joins an impressive new group of North American authors, like Aimee Bender, who are making the fable popular again. Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day cements Loory as an important fresh voice in contemporary literature.
Ben Loory has published short stories in journals such as The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, Nashville Review, decomP, and many others. He has worked as a screenwriter for Alex Proyas, Mark Johnson, and Jodie Foster. He is a
member of the Writers Guild of America west, and holds an MFA from the
American Film Institute. Stories for Nighttime and Some for Day is his first book.
Micah Dean Hicks writes fables, modern fairy tales, and other kinds of
magical stories. His work is published or forthcoming in over 30
magazines, including Cream City Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and PANK. He is a creative writing Ph.D. student at Florida State University.