Day for Night
Frederick Reiken
April 2010
336 pages
Published by Reagan Arthur Books
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Yo, FTC lackeys: Dawn very kindly shared her ARC with me. I suspect she wanted me to share in the mind-f^ck that is this book. And that’s my word, not hers, so don’t go sending the censors after her.
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I seem to be on a streak of reading books that leave me confuzzled.
This is a tale made up of interconnected stories…and they get even more interconnected as the tale progresses. It’s very skillfully done, too…at no time did I think “you have got to be kidding me” whenever a character reappeared later in the book in a time and place I never would’ve expected them.
However, I’ll be damned if I know how to explain it. It has allusions to cults, some of the characters are Holocaust survivors and others play in a rock band, it’s set in Utah and Florida and New Jersey and Israel and Poland and Lithuania, there are manatees, there’s a pet hyena, one character has a stroke, another is in a coma, and another has leukemia, and there is one character that goes by 50 bajillion names.
It’s the character of 50 bajillion names that (sort of) connects everything together. She may or may not be a fugitive (in a more serious way than the Foster Farm chickens were fugitives), and she often pops up in inexplicable ways. Kind of like Mighty Mouse…you know, here she comes to save the day. And I bet you weren’t expecting a post that mentions both Mighty Mouse and the Foster Farm chickens. And the Holocaust.
Okay, pop culture super-heroes aside, this is a great book, although I still have no idea what the author was getting at, beyond some weird interconnectedness shit (as in we’re all interconnected, not just the stories that make up this book). The stories were compelling (seriously, I couldn’t stop reading and I finished this in one day), the characters interesting, and the end baffling. I’m still wondering if the woman of 50 bajillion names was meant to be some sort of mystical equivalent of Mighty Mouse, and if Jonah (another character who seemed to keep popping up) was her predecessor.
And while I was googling for cover images, I stumbled across the meaning of the title. Day for night is a cinematographic technique in which night-time is created by the use of special lights. In other words, you’re creating the illusion of night-time. Hmmmmm.
And here are some other reviews, if you’d like to read more coherent posts:





















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