Night Soul and Other Stories

The fusing of space and time is something usually left to the province of physics but New York City native Joseph McElroy has been doing something like this in his innovative fiction for over forty years. Night Soul and Other Stories is his first-ever collection of short fiction, and it packs a mind-blowing wallop. No one story is structured in a conventional, linear manner; instead McElroy creates a force field of coincidence and contingency through which his characters move, maybe not in contact, but always connected. A flat tire brings together an architect and an acupuncturist but, as the story unfolds, a third party—the stranger who fixes the flat—is revealed to have had a deciding influence in what first appeared as chance. Conspiracies and mysteries abound in McElroy's fiction but, unlike Pynchon, to whom he's often compared, there's none of the paranoia to accompany it. Beneath the high-octane intellect at work is a genuine tenderness, a humane and hopeful impulse. A story ostensibly about a town that has exploded, leaving behind an enormous crater, turns out to also be a moving fable about loss, grief, and recovery. Even the order of the stories, some new, some previously published, allows recurring images and themes—boomerangs, water, an infant in a crib—to bind and bounce off each other, ingeniously creating a kind of unified field; a series of systems within a larger system. Demanding yet deeply rewarding, Night Soul is among McElroy's best work.