A review by annevoi
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory

3.0

This may be the sort of book that you need to savor slowly, a story at a time, but I did not: I hurried through it, simply to get it over with. It consists of 40 very short stories, populated by nameless people and the occasional tea-drinking octopus, walking tree, or play-writing television set, and all manner of weird stuff happens, often with a twist at the end. I suppose the stories might be allegorical, and some of them do give you something to think about in terms of our perceptions of others or our understanding of cause-and-effect or of the nature of dreams (and nightmares). Loory has a wild, extravagant imagination, that's for sure, though the writing style is very plain, as befits a fable or fairy tale. Too plain for me, and many of the stories felt like they might have been written in response to a prompt—too slight to be considered a full-fledged "story." But again, perhaps the effect is different if you, say, take forty days to read the book, and let the mystery or darkness or whimsy or horror of each story settle in you. I will never know.