A dreadful, hopeful, insightful, and reality-questioning collection of stories
André Alexis (Days by Moonlight, Fifteendogs) is an award-winning Canadian author. In 2017 he won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for his body of work, a prestigious award offered across four categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama.
The Night Piece: Collected Short Fiction (2020) is exactly that, short fiction. The book itself is divided into separate characters and locations, yet rarely do the stories play off of one another. The one that drew my attention, however, was the title story “The Night Piece.”
“The Night Piece” is an interestingly told tale, one that you wouldn’t necessarily appreciate without reading “Wilderness” and the four “Ottawa” stories that precede it. Those five very short stories set the tone of what’s to come.
Alexis’ use of imagery and subtle language draws you in but doesn’t simplify itself too much. There is a layman’s edge to the writing, where everything is describable, but the horror and despair throughout “The Night Piece” carries complex feelings of dread.
“The Night Piece” tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy named Michael who meets a dying man at a wedding. Without any provocation you are suddenly swept into the story of this man; a man who is simply looking for work but is constantly plagued by tiredness and a possible brush with the supernatural that may or may not be real.
When the story itself eventually shifts back to Micheal, the feeling of despair transfers from the dying man to the boy, keeping him up at night for a short while.
Alexis’ command of the story is something I haven’t seen written on the page since Lovecraft’s Dagon or The Shadow over Innsmouth.
But, to compare Alexis to Lovecraft would be doing him a disservice, as he is very much his own writer. Alexis uses the page as a brush to paint a vivid picture. You see the eyeless woman as you read, and it is just as unsettling to you as it was to Michael and the dying man.
In this story you are Michael, and the perspective change to the dying man for the bulk of the story puts you in the terrifying role of listener, unable to resist his mystery and dreadful air. Michael’s immediate thoughts after the story also echoed my own — was the dying man lying? There’s no way his story is true, so why am I terrified that it might be?
We never truly find the answers, and there are enough questions left by the end of the story where it could go either way, which is the most haunting part of the story.
Throughout the other stories in the collection, Alexis’ command of the written word continues. There are flashes of humour in an almost poetic nature throughout. It is no surprise that Alexis is an award-winning writer, and this collection exemplifies his talent and passion for the craft.
If there is one collection you read this year, The Night Piece: Collected Short Fiction won’t come close to disappointing.
A version of this article appeared in print in The Ontarion issue 190.1 on Jan. 4, 2020.
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