The Great Night: A Novel

By Chris Adrian

Acclaimed as a "gifted, courageous writer"(The New York Times), Chris Adrian brings all his extraordinary talents to bear in The Great Night—a brilliant and mesmerizing retelling of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco's Buena Vista Park, the secret home of Titania, Oberon, and their court. On this night, something awful is happening in the faerie kingdom: in a fit of sadness over the end of her marriage, which broke up in the wake of the death of her adopted son, Titania has set loose an ancient menace, and the chaos that ensues will threaten the lives of immortals and mortals alike.

Selected by The New Yorker as one the best young writers in America, Adrian has created a singularly playful, heartbreaking, and humorous novel—a story that charts the borders between reality and dreams, love and magic, and mortality and immortality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781429961004

Chris Adrian

CHRIS ADRIAN is the author of Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital and A Better Angel, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Adrian, a fellow in pediatric hematology and oncology at the University of California and a Ph.D. student at Harvard Divinity School, was also selected as one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” to watch.

Book preview

Part One

1

One 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 into it 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 had helped 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 regular child, 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 getting dark, 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 friend he 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 what that might mean. He hurried along the path, walking up the side of the hill toward a place where he was almost totally certain there was a road that cut straight across the park and led directly to Jordan’s block.

On the other side, and farther up the hill, Molly, having wandered a little around Ashbury Heights in the fog, came at last to the high western entrance to the park. Had she known that she was going in the wrong direction and that she had already passed within a few blocks of Jordan’s house, she might have given up entirely on going to the party. She already felt painfully self-conscious—she felt that way whenever she left her house, and imagined everywhere she went that people whispered about her, saying, There goes that poor girl and The poor thing!—and lately she had learned to avoid all sorts of lesser disasters and heartbreaks and misfortunes by recognizing them from far away; getting lost on the way to a party you didn’t want to attend, on the way to a date you were neither interested in nor ready for—that was a sign from somebody that you really should turn around and go home.

She sat down on the curb and put her hands over her face—it felt like she’d spent most of the last eighteen months in this pose but lately she did it really more because it helped her gather her thoughts than because it was a good position in which to cry—and considered things for a moment. She could feel her couch pulling at her from way back at Sixteenth and Judah, but she knew she’d come too far, in both her own and other people’s estimation, to go back now. If she didn’t show up, people would think she still couldn’t move on from Ryan’s death. The truth was, she couldn’t, but she didn’t want that to be obvious to the gossipy old ladies who seemed to live in the hearts of all her friends. Everything is not ruined, she said, repeating a mantra that had started off as a joke, pulled from a ridiculous guide to getting over the suicide of your boyfriend. The guide had been sent to her by a distant aunt, part of the small subsection of her extended family not crazy for Jesus, and though it was less ridiculous than any of the countless Christian manuals of survivorship that flocked her way, Molly had still chortled over its obvious and unconvincing lessons in the first few months: Everything is not ruined; it wasn’t your fault; you will be loved again someday by a nonsuicidal person. But as she degraded over the months it became her secular Bible and her best friend, and once she even dreamed sexually about the author, a great big lesbian with tight gray poodle hair, swathed in purple from head to toe in her gigantic back-cover author photo.

Her date tonight was with Jordan Sasscock himself. The honor of this was lost on her, as she barely knew him. He had come into her shop to visit one of her coworkers, and then had returned again and again, buying increasingly pricey arrangements of flowers and then increasingly pricey design pieces, a process that culminated in the purchase of an exorbitantly expensive Scandinavian foam couch cunningly crafted to look just like a boulder. I’ve been looking for one of these for years! he said, lounging in it. He looked very appealing with his hands behind his head; the swell of his biceps pleasingly echoed in the contours of the fake rock.

Everyone else in the shop—boys and girls alike—swooned over him, but Molly hardly noticed him at first, and for the longest time assumed he just really liked flowers and good design, until he finally asked her out. That was a strange moment. Time seemed to stop and everything seemed to tremble, not just the flowers but the colors in them, the air itself, and the porcelain bells above the door, which seemed just on the verge of ringing, everything so very gently disturbed. I’m having a little get-together this Thursday and I want you to be my guest of honor, he had said. When she only stared, marveling at the odd ripple that stole over his face and body, he added, Or you could just show up at some point. You don’t have to be guest of honor, if that’s too much responsibility. Anyway, think about it. He told her his address, which she misremembered immediately.

Sure, she said, without thinking about it at all. See you there. She had packaged up his latest purchase, a transparent piece of china with a hand-painted rim of little blue flowers, and now she handed it to him, not smiling. Sensing perhaps that to do so would push his luck, he didn’t say anything else but just smiled and nodded. When he left, her boss let out a shriek of delight. You’ve got a date with Jordan Sasscock! she shouted, grabbing Molly’s shoulders and jumping up and down like a fool.

It’s not a date, Molly said. I’m just going to his party. It would be another hour before she fully regretted the decision to say yes, and then it would seem like the stupidest thing she’d ever done. She spent the next few days telling herself that she wasn’t ready for this, and that she was, and that she wasn’t. Now, sitting on the curb with her face in her hands, she felt sure that she wasn’t, and only because she was still in love with Ryan—or still in something with him. The feeling that dominated her day and night was not the same lovely invigorating obsession she had felt every day before his death, when he seemed like the very beginning and end of her perception, his mind and body and spirit each an occasion of persistent joy. Ever since she had come home to find him hanging by his neck from a tree in their garden, only the character of the feeling had changed, not the strength of it. She had married him the instant she met him, and now he still attracted and owned all her parts.

Jordan Sasscock! she shouted, lifting her face out of her hands, and somehow that made her feel better. She was sure a voice answered her, but instead of saying, Shut up! or Yes, dear? it said, very quietly, Poodle.

Leave me alone! she said, not sure whether she was addressing Jordan or Ryan or sardonic voices that, while they weren’t exactly hallucinations, weren’t voices that anyone but she could hear. It’s just a party, she said to herself, when nothing and no one else answered her. What’s the worst thing that could happen? She got up, not considering the worst things, turned around, and found she had missed the entrance in a shadow and had sat down very close to it. She put her arms around herself and bowed her head and walked into the park.

2

At the top of the hill, just beyond the threshold of ordinary human senses, a door was opening in the earth, letting out a light that was as lustrous and thin as autumn sunshine. The light spilled down the hill and seemed to calm everything it touched: branches stopped their trembling despite the wind, and little creatures paused in their snuffling, as if leaf and shrew both were waiting and listening for the sound that shortly came drifting up out of the hole into the earth. It was a noise of bells, at first extremely faint and then not much louder but somehow more obvious, perhaps because, though the noise was soft and the individual tones quite pleasant, there were odd harmonies and overtones unnerving to animal ears. Shadows appeared in the light, reaching down the hill, followed by a variety of figures.

They came in twos, matched by height (because that was pleasing to their Mistress) though not by form, so lovely creatures were paired with homely ones and wizened faces with young ones. Opposite and antagonistic natures were paired together as well, though this was harder to tell simply by observation, except where the smiles (also mandated) were obviously forced and where, instead of just holding hands, each partner held the other’s wrist in a mutual, clawing clutch. It was as stately a procession as a bridal march, though a very keen observer, or one who had seen the faeries pour out of the hill in the days before their King was lost and their Queen went into mourning, would have noticed a tired, shuffling quality to it. In other days, decorum restrained a joy at the dusking of another night; now it propped up tired, depressed spirits, some of whom would have preferred to stay under the hill, dreaming of better times.

Soon dozens and dozens of them had come out into the night, the first few no taller than a thimble. The last few, as tall as streetlamps, were followed by eight more, all of a middling height, who bore a litter upon which their Queen reclined, propped up with coarse black pillows, blackbirds fluttering in her hair and two black cats, entirely uninterested in the birds, asleep on her lap. She yawned as she went through the door, carried after the rest of the procession in a half loop that took her to the flat top of the hill. There her bearers set the litter down on the thick, soft grass and danced around her in a ring. Every step was choreographed for the Queen’s pleasure, though it had been years since she had taken an interest in the design of the dance and many months since she had really paid any attention to them as they performed for her.

Still paired, the faeries danced five turns around the litter, twisting and dipping, one now leading and then following, one lifting the other partner when the bells rang a particularly discordant note, the lifted dancer now doing a split and now a curtsy toward the Lady, until the bells rang faster and the couples disengaged, everyone dancing alone, increasingly frenzied yet precise, as the bells rang ever louder. It was a sight to nauseate and entrance any human observer, though the dance was not what it once was, and the dancers, for all the ways they leaped high and threw their bodies low, looked as bored, in their frozen, smiling faces, as their Queen.

In waves the bells reached toward a crescendo until they broke, and then a hundred different unsettling overtones hung a few moments more in the air over the hill. The frenzy of the dancers broke as well, and they stopped, scattered in heaps around the litter but not sweating or out of breath. Smiles vanished, finally no longer required, and they all stood and bowed toward their Queen, who was idly stroking one of the cats and entirely ignoring the other, though it pressed its face into her belly. The birds in her hair had flown away. She flicked one hand absently at her court, and they rose, their unsmiling faces now showing every sort of emotion except happiness. A frog-sized gnome with very curly brown hair was glaring furiously at her, and a feathered, pony-sized woman was staring at her with a combination of sadness and desire, while another lady, tall and pale and barked like a birch, was silently weeping.

They stood around like that for a time, silent conversations passing from face to face; the host had grown accustomed to such long, boring silences, for the Queen had the privilege of speaking the first words of the night, and this was especially true tonight, the Great Night, the midsummer holiday when all their customs were most formal. Some nights it was halfway to dawn before she called for a game or named the clouds or sang a song (always sad ones, these days). Tonight she seemed to nap a little, clutching now at both cats, who did not squirm like ordinary cats would but suffered her tight embrace, staring into each other’s eyes, panting and gasping a little at the pressure around their necks and chests. The darkness had hardly fully settled under the trees before she started and sat up and spoke.

Where’s Puck?

A collective sigh escaped from the host, and they dropped their stiff poses, some of them reclining on the grass while others turned away from their enforced partners to seek out their real friends and lovers. Some of them retired in twos and threes to the edge of the summit of the hill, not quite brave enough to leave entirely, but so sure no Great Night festivities were coming that they were already conspiring to make their own party. But three individuals stood by the litter. Formerly Oberon’s closest servants, they had given up or forgotten their names when he disappeared and borrowed others from the human world.

Up to no good, said Fell, who was beaver-sized and somewhat beaver-faced.

Out in the city making babies cry, said Lyon, one of those faeries whose appearance mirrored his disposition but not his name; he looked to be made of tightly spooled string and was seven feet tall at his shoulder.

Searching for our Master, and ever faithfully, said Oak, who might be mistaken for a human boy if you missed his rabbit’s feet and thickly furred face and bottom. He was the nearest thing Puck had in the entire faerie company to a friend since Oberon had disappeared.

Summon him, said the Queen, holding out the cats. Oak and Fell each took one, holding them at an odd angle, and began to squeeze them not quite in succession, so they let out an overlapping series of shrieks and yowls. Despite the abuse, the cats remained docile, not clawing or spitting but only making noise, as dutifully as any instrument. The cats sounded for nearly five minutes, the company around them drawing farther away from the players, not because they didn’t enjoy the music but because of how much they feared Puck. There was a tune in the wailing of the cats, not very obvious at first, but it was actually a very short bit of song they were playing, repeated again and again, something that shared a lot of notes with Danny Boy, though to anyone who knew that song it would seem as if notes of violence and threat had been inserted at random into the music. It was those elements, as much as the mandate of obedience laid by Oberon upon the wild spirit who had nearly destroyed them a thousand years before, that drew Puck into the presence of the Queen. Before he appeared, walking quite unremarkably up the hill, a whistling was heard, an echo and exaggeration of the song of the cats. Puck’s whistling grew as loud as and then louder than the cats, until he stopped a few feet before the Queen and bowed.

People and faeries, animals and spirits—any observing entity—each saw Puck a little differently. What you saw depended on how you were feeling; he was often the image of one’s worst fear or most troubling anxiety. To some of the faeries he looked like a naked boy with a luxurious Afro, and only the height of the boy or the width of the Afro changed from eye to eye. But some saw him as a sliver of flame, or a blackness heavier and darker than the black air, or a fluttering pair of dark wings, and some saw him as an image of their Queen only even more depressed, disheveled, and defeated-looking. In every form he wore a chain, sometimes made of tiny silver acorns or leaves of twisted silver grass. Sometimes the chain was made of thick links of silver manacle, and sometimes it was just silver glints upon the air or the fire. The chain had been placed there by Oberon a very long time ago, so long ago that no one but the Queen remembered the true particulars of the binding, though the battle was a story they all had once sung under the hill and one they celebrated every Midsummer’s Eve.

Where is your Master? Titania asked him.

Still hidden, he said.

But the last report was so … promising, she said. She had been trying to discover the King by reports of unusual events in the city, because she was sure he had not quit the world but only sunk himself in it, putting on a mortal face and a mortal life because she had wounded him when his heart was already broken, like hers, over the death of their son. She never went out to look for him herself anymore, even though she was sure she would have recognized him no matter how expert his disguise; as lost as he might be to himself right now, he would never be lost to her if she could only stand before him. And she only barely trusted Puck, even under his world-heavy bonds, because all love of his Master was forced on him, and what did he care, really, if her King and husband and lover never returned? But lately she could not abide the sight of mortal boys; everyone looked like their Boy, and so she, Queen of the Night and Empress of the Air and Suzeraine of the Autumn Moon and the bearer of a hundred thousand other lofty titles, some of which could only be expressed in hours of music, ran sweating and shaking from blue-socked babies in their strollers and baseball-capped toddlers and little hoodlums on skateboards, and cried for days under the hill after each time she ventured out. Once, a few dim but well-meaning sprites had scouted out a poor replica of her Boy and called him up to the hill, singing him out of the Mission, warding him as he crossed the street, turning buses and bicycles out of his path as he walked in a daze, not quite awake but compelled toward the park, held fast by the certainty that every good thing he ever had wanted was waiting for him there. When he presented himself in a stupor at the bald top of the hill, mouth agape at the faeries, who were only partially hidden from him, it roused the Queen from her own stupor. In an instant she understood the nature of the spell and knew who had cast it. In another she had punished them, as swift in her vengeance as she ever was in the good old days when every night was great, when the host spent the hours on the hill from dusk to dawn consumed in masques of jealousy and violent, elevating, rejuvenating lust. With a mere gesture, she tore the wings from the do-gooders and forced them to bear the boy upon their wounded backs, crawling under him in the dirt as he dozed and drooled until they deposited him on the Haight Street sidewalk.

Often, but not always, when her subjects assumed she was lost in sad reverie, she was actually listening to the city where her husband had hidden himself, though it wasn’t any ordinary sense of hearing that she deployed. As she lay on her litter or her bier, startling little flashes of wonder would flare up beyond the hill, sometimes so intensely that she could feel them like a warmth against her face. These showed her where to direct her attention, and it was not much longer before she could discern the particulars of the event: a child floats away with his kite; a dog suddenly grows flowers in its coat; a hideous transvestite stumbling down Eighteenth Street at 2 a.m. actually becomes, for twenty paces, a beautiful woman. This was magic, and it must indicate the presence of her lost love, because for a long time now magic had been absent from the city and the country beyond the hill. In his hidden state, unknown to himself and unaware of his power, the magic would seep from Oberon and temporarily change the world around him, at random or according to the changeable and petty wishes of the mortals with whom he slummed. The latest report had been the most promising: A white bull, cock a-swagger and head held high, had paraded through a coffee shop in Noe Valley and then strolled down Twenty-fourth Street toward Diamond Heights.

This was a sign like none other. The white bull was one of his aspects; a form to wear in battle or in passion but also one he liked to wear after a bitter quarrel with her, because she could never stay angry at him when he was a creature so warm and breathy, and she could never detect any duplicity in Oberon’s apologies in those giant brown eyes. So it was a sign and a signal. He had become his most distinctive beast because he was ready to put back on his power and become her King again, and because he was so sorry for leaving her, for hurting her more than he’d ever done before in all the years of their marriage.

I never saw the bull, Puck said, though the wonder of him was written still on the faces of all the mortals who beheld him. I followed his scent for a quarter mile and found a bush wet with his piss. See? I brought you a flower from it. From somewhere on his naked person he produced a small blue flower with thick hairy petals that glistened as if they were still wet. He took a deep whiff and presented it to her with another bow and flourish. "It is his stink!’ he said with a wide smile. A light came off his teeth too bright for most of them to look at long, though Titania was never cowed by it. She snatched the flower from him and brought it hesitantly to her face. Puck had frozen it in time, but his spell came apart in her hand. The petals softened and felt moist instead of glassy, and when she shook the flower a few drops fell onto her dress as the salt and iron odor rose up and transported her into a rapture of nostalgia. It was pathetic, she knew, to weep over the scent of her lost lover’s piss, but it was the first time in a year she had been able to partake of his odor, since all his clothes had disappeared on the same day he did, and the sheets on his side of their bed, too. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, though she would have cherished it even if it were. It smelled powerful and ancient and sad, and she thought she could apprehend in it some trace, a compacted seed, of the extraordinary love he

Reviews for The Great Night

[john_warner-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In this retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream Titania, queen of the fairies, has been immobilized with inconsolable grief over the death of her changeling son. Her grief is so great that she has become estranged from her husband, Oberon, and, in her despair, she has unleashed Puck, the only creature who almost bested Titania in combat. While these events are occurring under the hill, three lonely, lovelorn humans have chosen to take a shortcut through San Francisco's Buena Vista Park, only to become entrapped within its boundaries, which includes Oberon and Titiania's realm.I was drawn to this book because A Midsummer's Night Dream is one of my favorite Shakespeare's play. I found the fantasy in this urban fantasy more like magical realism, which I enjoy. However, the number of characters in this story was difficult to track made only more confusing with the various back stories of the humans and a troupe of homeless actors in the park rehearsing a musical based on the science fiction movie, Soylent Green ("Soylent Green is people!"). I frequently found my mind in its own midsummer's night dream.

[gayla.bassham · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I love Chris Adrian, but I never got into this book. Very disappointing.

[abbeyhar · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Man. If I only had two words to describe this book, they would be "whimsical" and "heartwrenching." It was like the movie "hook" plus sex scenes and a lot of death and sadness, plus a touch of Tom Robbins wryness. I wasn't sure at first, the first 50 pages are a bit slow, but after that I couldn't put it down.

The author went to Harvard Divinity school, got his MFA from Iowa and is also a doctor (pediatric oncology). Kind of amazing. I want to read "The Children's Hospital" next.

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A bit of a dud. The one interesting device this book has going for it is importing a darker version of the magic characters from "A Midsummer Night's Dream", but this is squandered among a cast of mortals with teenager emotions that the reader has no reason to care for.

[laura400 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well, this isn't a perfect book. The plot is confusing, a few characters could have been excised, and the book is repetitive and perhaps a little hard to follow at times. Adrian's style is a bit complex and long-winded for me. Yet the book was so interesting that it carried me along anyway. It's really creative and somehow manages to be original, even though it's based on a Midsummer Night's Dream.The highlight of the book for me was a fantastic section dealing with the illness of Oberon and Titania's adopted human son. The book is worth reading just for that.

[martitia_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Adrian explores the geography of loss in his retelling of a Midsummer Night's Dream. I liked the original style and was haunted by his images of lost children. But, it didn't reach the bar set by my favorites so far this year, The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. I will read more by this author.