Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben LooryMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
There's no way a reader and writer like me was going to pass up a story collection from someone whose work appears in The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, decomP, Monkeybicycle, PANK, et al., and whose book is blurbed by Ray Bradbury and Gary K. Wolfe!
I get the accusations about the book being "gimmicky". I get that some readers require characters to have things like names other than The Man, The Woman, or The Octopus. I get that the structure of these stories can seem repetitive. While the language, characterization, and descriptions of setting are stripped-down, it's done so strategically. There's still enough sense of character and place for relatively whole stories. Stories that are as instructive as any fable, complete with a moral--but which are as subject to interpretation as any myth.
When a story ends, so endeth the lesson. And while the lessons might not be profound necessarily, I think that's the point. The lessons are truths we (should) all know. What's profound is how Loory illustrates these truths with a mix of the real and unreal. Loory deftly places his character and the reader in all sorts of fantastic worlds. And what they find there is what we find here: the Kabat-Zinn truism of, "Wherever you go, there you are."
I know some writers and critics in speculative fiction for whom this would absolutely stick in their craw. And some of those folks intersect with those I know who don't much enjoy short stories, let alone short-short fiction. They tend not to be people I drink with, anyway.
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