“Adrian is such a forceful, potent writer that this non-realistic world commands its own searing, tangible realism on the page. For this isn't only a novel about magic and faeries, it's a novel about grief and loss and heartbreak . . . If you're willing to enter something magical, something dazzling and heartbreaking, then Adrian is a writer for you.” — Patrick Ness, The Guardian “. . . An enthralling nightmare. . . With the lusty, darkly comic finish comes an urge to wash one’s hands while applauding; Adrian has twisted a romantic folly into a incredibly depraved orgy. Those who don’t see the smut in Shakespeare might be shocked, but the Bard himself would likely be proud to see the bodily fluids spilled across one of his most beloved classics.”— Josh Davis, Time Out New York “Chris Adrian’s novels puff you full of delight, then rips your heart out. Adrian's a sadist, maybe. Or maybe he's got the biggest heart of any living writer, so big that it can hold the sweetest thoughts alongside shame and also death — real death, in all its devastation and splendor.”—Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Phoenix
“Magical. . . Adrian. . . uses Shakespeare’s comedy not for a virtuosic display of stylistic mimicry but as a vessel to help him access and contain the amazingly bountiful, sparkling ‘jewels from the deep’ (as the Bard called them) of his rich imagination.”—Heller McAlpin, National Public Radio“A wild ride—I found [The Great Night] almost viscerally thrilling, especially the experience of moving through [Adrian’s] prose as it crackles and purrs . . . the most brilliant and profound reimagining in Adrian’s vision isn’t the way he magics the humans but the way he humanifies Shakespeare’s fairies . . . Reading The Great Night was an extraordinary experience. When I finished it, I started it over again.”—Alexandra Mullen, The Barnes and Noble Review
“Adrian has demonstrated a vast imagination in his earlier books, particularly The Children’s Hospital, a tale of doctors and patients and angels (yes, angels) in a post-apocalyptic hospital that has become the world’s new ark. He is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology and a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, and his work indeed suggests a profound interest in where life meets death and how we make sense of that great undiscovered country . . . The Great Night is no exception . . . Adrian once again left me feeling both meditative and moved.”—Chris Bohjalian, The Boston Globe
“Himself a pediatric oncologist, Adrian has always written with depth and compassion about grief, but I can’t recall anything in his two prior novels or collection of stories that matches that chapters in [The Great Night] describing what it’s like to be a mother experiencing the loss of a child . . . Rather than Pyramus and Thisbe, we’re treated to a musical version of “Soylent Green,” the 1973 dystopian thriller starring Charlton Heston, in which there isn’t enough to eat, and the Soylent Corp. makes its money by secretly turning people into food. The humor is—well—delicious. But it also makes a joyous, life-affirming point, echoing Shakespeare’s own insistence that lovers must eventually return to everyday life in Athens.”—Mike Fischer, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“[Adrian] can pack more depth of understanding about what makes a human human into a single page than many novelists wedge into entire books. More than perhaps any author today, he understands people. His characters, whether men or pixies, are us . . . In fact, the scariest and most surprising thing about The Great Night is that it’s proof that some lives and conditions and heartbreaks and losses and joys are so bewildering, they can only be understood as myths.”—Tyler Cabot, Esquire “Adrian. . . covered smaller, more controlled canvases in his previous works—Gob’s Grief and The Children’s Hospital, and the story collection A Better Angel. The Great Night—by turns brilliant, cruel, tenderhearted, visionary, poetic, and profane—is Adrian’s ambitious attempt to fetch from his own imagination what Shakespeare referred to as ‘jewels from the deep.’”—Lisa Shea, Elle “William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream deals with illusion—in particular, the illusion that things can be set aright, as if by magic. This riff by New Yorker 20 Under 40 author Adrian (A Better Angel) is a whole lot darker, declaring that no magic can take away the memory of suffering and that in our self-serving scramble we disdain the pain (and indeed the goodness) of others. On the summer solstice in San Francisco, the fairies come out from under their hill in Buena Vista Park to celebrate Great Night. But this year there will be no celebration, for Oberon has vanished and Titania is thoroughly undone by the death of her Boy, one of the many changelings brought to her by Puck--no mischievous sprite but a malevolent spirit. Even as a rowdy bunch rehearse a play aimed at exposing the mayor's crimes against the homeless, three people are trapped in the park by the fairies’ madness: uptight Molly, lovesick Will, and gentle, obsessed Henry, who still misses decamped lover Bobby and whose tragic past and connections to other characters unfold tantalizingly. Verdict: Inventive and scarily beautiful, this could wipe out casual readers, but it is an extraordinary novel.”—Library Journal (starred review)
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Great Night
Part One1One night in the middle of June, three brokenhearted people walked into Buena Vista Park at nearly the same time, just after dark. One came from the north, out of the Haight, another climbed up out of the Castro from the east, and the last came from the west, out of the Sunset and Cole Valley: this one was already going in the wrong direction, and shortly all three of them would be lost. They were going to a seasonal party of the famously convivial Jordan Sasscock, at his home at 88 Buena Vista West (Molly was headed, mistakenly, to 88 Buena Vista East). Jordan's parties were as famously convivial as he was, and the invitations, while prized, were not exactly exclusive, because it was in the nature of his conviviality never to leave anyone feeling left out. There were swarms of people who trudged up the hill in the middle of every summer to drink Jordan's beer and wine and stand on his roof and dance in his expansive garden. He was a lowly resident at the hospital nearby, but his grandmother had died five years before when he was still a medical student, leaving him the house and the garden and all the treasures and garbage she had stuffed intoit in the eighty-nine years she had lived there: ruined priceless furniture and money under the mattresses and case after case of fancy cat food in the basement, and fifteen cats, only five of which were still alive on the night of the party, because, affable as he was, Jordan didn't much like cats, and he didn't take very good care of them.Henry, like the other two people entering the park, was late. He was not even sure he was entirely invited, though it seemed that everyone at the hospital was invited, just as he wasn't sure that Jordan Sasscock liked him, though Jordan seemed to like everybody. They happened to be working together that month on the Pediatric Oncology service, and here and there a flail or a mistake had occurred that was almost certainly Henry's fault, and yet somehow the blame had spilled onto Jordan. Henry generally sought out blame, being comfortable with it, having been blamed for all sorts of things his whole life long and having accepted responsibility for all sorts of crimes he had only barely committed, at ease in the habit of culpability because he had an abiding suspicion, fostered by an unusual amount of blank history in his childhood, that he had once done something unforgivably wrong.Three months before, he would have stayed home on a night like this, in the context of an invitation like this, entertaining potential scenes of confrontation or humiliation or trickery: Jordan telling him quietly to leave, or asking from the middle of a group of encircling unfriendly faces if he could see Henry's invitation; didn't Henry know an invitation was necessary to come to the party? But Henry had turned over a new leaf since his lover had issued his latest and most final rejection. He was spending less time imprisoned in imaginary scenarios, and through no recognizable effort of his own he was becoming, day by day, a better man. It was a shame, really, that all the faults and neuroses and quite considerable pathologies that hadhelped spoil the relationship were finally lifting from him just in time to be too late. The timing was ridiculous, and it added significantly to his heartbreak that it had done no good to demonstrate his renaissance to Bobby, who had been out to San Francisco for a month to work (and expressly not, he said, to visit Henry). Bobby had issued his most detailed, hope-abolishing rejection on the day before he left, and they hadn't talked in all the months that had passed since then. It was a dismal discovery: there were so many different intensities of rejection, and every successive "no!" could feel worse and worse. It had put Henry into a state of what felt like perpetual agony, and yet he wasn't exactly depressed, or at least he was depressed in a totally different way than he had been all his remembered life up until then. Dull, quotidian misery had been replaced with a brighter sort of suffering, and he felt more connected to everything and everyone around him than he had for twenty years. Each day for weeks he had given up some neurotic quirk: excessive hand washing; fear of doorknobs and the ground; a reluctance to touch the sick children of smokers; fear, most recently, that having a single drink of alcohol would transform him into a monster. "People like us shouldn't drink," his mother had told him, over and over and over, "because of the horrible things that have happened to us." With one hand she would mime throwing back a shot and with the other draw an imaginary knife across her throat. "Ack," she'd say, as her invisible lifeblood poured out. "Instant addict." Never mind all that. He had already decided to drink a lot of beer at the party.There remained, of course, the fear of the park itself, part and parcel of his old habits of bleaching and hand-washing and hand-wringing. The place had used to make his skin crawl, and the whole city and even the state around the park had made him uneasy even before it became intolerable to imagine being there. He had lived in San Francisco as a regularchild, and then as a child abducted, and those unremembered years between the ages of nine and thirteen had cast a pall over the whole city. The story, as little of it as he had reconstructed, was as weird as the behaviors he had manifested when it could not be contained any longer in unmemory, and the strangeness of it had attracted Bobby in the beginning, as much as it had ultimately tortured him and driven him away in the end.It's just a park, he thought, standing at the entrance, just a collection of trees and bushes artfully planted to approximate a wild wood on a hill. The worst thing about it, in fact, was that Bobby had brought him here to tell him to fuck off forever, to leave him alone for all eternity, to never bother him again, and part of Henry was still sensitive to the imagined residues of physical and emotional trauma, though he wasn't controlled anymore by his aversion to them. He would take a break and sit on the very fucking bench where Bobby had said goodbye, just for the sake of doing it, and he would consider how atrociously sad and ridiculous the collapse of their relationship was, how all the pieces of an extraordinary partnership had come together in just the wrong way. Then he would set the timer on his phone and spend a full five minutes demonstrating to the uncaring world and his unwatching lover that he was not who he had been.Henry stepped off Haight Street onto the first step up into the park, thinking again that his was as magical a transformation as to have woken up one day to find he had become a pony. And he had a little daydream about Henry the pony, because even though he had been liberated from the obsessive prisons of his imagination, he was still an inveterate daydreamer. He was sure it must be an escaping wisp of the daydream when he thought he saw a face in the stone wall beside the step and thought he heard a voice say, very clearly, "Poodle!" He stopped and peered at the wall; it was gettingdark, so when he stared all he could see was a rough suggestion of the texture on the stone. He shook his head and did a little pony step and kept walking into the park.A little farther north, Will was trying to find a way in. He had come up the steps from Waller Street, expecting to find another staircase, but there was only the sidewalk that encircled the park and then some not very passable-looking brush separating him from a path that wound up the side of the hill. He thought he saw someone moving on the other side of the brush and took that for an indication that there was an entrance nearby. He was frustrated and late and anxious about entering the park so late in the day, because the chances of getting afflicted with an uninvited grope rose exponentially if you went in after sunset. He lived in the Castro in a sea of homosexuals, and loved his neighborhood and his neighbors, and judged no one. If anything, he felt a kinship with those lonely souls drifting through the muffling darkness, rubbing up against one another, accidentally burning one another with the tips of cigarettes. It wasn't so long ago that he had been engaged in parallel pursuits. He had rooted in a different trough, but he knew what it was like to be lonely and to commit intimate acts that only made you feel lonelier still. The horror of it, and what made him a sorrier sort than even the most hideous troll in the park, was the fact that he had done such things while in the company of the most wonderful woman on earth. He had burrowed all through that relationship, making slimy tunnels, and at last it collapsed when his deceit and his unwarranted unhappiness were revealed.Will sighed, and realized he had been standing on the sidewalk not moving at all, distracted by unprofitable thoughts, and it was getting very dark. He looked at his watch and became anxious again at how late he was. Jordan Sasscock was friends with both Will and Carolina, the only mutual friendhe hadn't lost when she left him, and one of the only people in his whole circle of friends who sort of sympathized with him, both disgusted and understanding in a way that made Will think that at least one person in the world had forgiven him for what he had done to her. It was entirely possible--Jordan had hinted at it--that Carolina would be there tonight. And Jordan had hinted further that she knew Will might be there too. It was the closest thing Will had had to good news in a year.He put his head down and pushed through the bushes, slipping and trying to catch his balance on a handful of leaves. With a little more scrabbling he was up the rise and on the path. He heard a whisper, very distinct, as he was wiping his hands off on his pants, that said something like "Poodle?""No ... get away!" Will shouted, assuming it was someone asking him if he wanted to poodle, and he was ashamed even to know ...
