Night Beast

by Ruth Joffre

Overview

A masterful collection from an important new voice in American fiction, Night Beast is a gorgeously written work of profound originality and vision. These doomed love stories and twisted fairytales explore the lives of women—particularly queer women and mothers—and reveal the monsters lurking in our daily lives: the madness, isolation, betrayals, and regrets that arise as we seek human connection.

Through this collection, readers are taken to places where the sun never sets, where cornfields rustle ominously and sleepwalkers prowl the night. In “Weekend,” the lead actors of an avant-garde television show begin to confuse their characters’ identities with their own; in “Go West, and Grow Up,” a young girl living in a car with her mother is forced to shed her innocence too soon; and in “Safekeeping,” a woman trapped inside a futuristic safehouse gradually unravels as she waits for her lover, who may never return.

With exquisite prose and transfixing imagery, Joffre explores worlds both strange and familiar, homing in on the darker side of humanity. Powerful, unsettling, and wildly imaginative, Night Beast is a mind-bending, genre-hopping debut, a provocative and uncommonly raw examination of relationships and sexuality, trauma and redemption, the meaning of family, and coming-of-age—and growing old—as an outsider.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802128089
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	05/08/2018
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ruth Joffre is the author of Night Beast. Born and raised in Northern Virginia, she graduated with honors from Cornell Universityand earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Masters Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Nashville Review, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She lives in Seattle, where she teaches writing and literature at the Hugo House.

Read an Excerpt

One of the Lies I Tell My Children (#5)

If they do not clean their room, pretty soon it will be declared a health hazard and systems will be installed in and around the area to prevent the spread of slime mold from the air conditioner to the attic. In the mornings when they get dressed for school my children will have to pass through a decontamination chamber, where I will scrub them and disinfect them, and where they will ask, in their weary voices, “Is this really necessary? The slime mold is our friend.” At night, its black, iridescent fingers will feel around the surfaces of the room, eventually creeping its way onto their pillows and their sheets, and they will encourage it with the sugar water and the potato chips they deliberately smear over their faces. In the beginning, the slime mold will be wary of the offer and retreat every morning when the alarm goes off and I come knocking on their door; then gradually it will grow comfortable with the arrangement and grow stalks inside their nostrils, which will be jellied and metallic, giving the appearance of nose rings or other piercings. When summer arrives the children will have no reason to go outside and will hide in their room, feeding their new mold pet, giving it swathes and patches of their flesh for it to stretch out and grow spores. One day, the mold will take over, and what were once children will become host beds for the oozing, aromatic fungus creeping up between their toes; and because I love them and know how much they love to be dirty I will hook them up to saline drips with glucose and allow the mushrooms to grow in the recesses of their body. It will be a slow process, occurring gradually over weeks and months, and necessitating a great deal of patience and understanding from me. Eventually, when school starts, my children will not be able to get out of bed, so I will stand over them, wishing I could see their hair under all the fungus. I will reach my hand out to stroke them, and in their strange unicellular way the slime molds will reach back, like flowers to the sun.

Editorial Reviews

03/05/2018
Most of the 11 stories in Joffre’s captivating debut conclude with haunting epiphanies that crystallize the emotions their characters have been grappling with throughout their telling. In “Go West, and Grow Up,” an impoverished mother and daughter who have been living out of their car for a year appear finally to escape the desperation of their lives, only to have their car stall out on the road miles from help. “Safekeeping” tells of a woman locked away in a bunker who finally rationalizes her imprisonment as an act of affection from the absent lover who placed her there. In “The Twilight Hotel,” a woman struggling to cope with an emotionally devastating miscarriage discovers that her increasingly estranged wife does not share her preferred escape fantasy. Joffre’s characters range from everyday moms negotiating the crankiness of their kids to people imprinted with digital clocks that tick down to the time they’ll meet their soulmate and, in the title story, a bride who has sex with her husband’s sister during her sleepwalking spells. They all experience love and loss in a collection that amounts to a cri de coeur for sympathy and understanding. This is an auspicious debut. Agent: Ross Harris, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Night Beast:

“What pure pleasure to recommend to you the debut collection of Ruth Joffre, whose stories are nimble, audacious, and far seeing.” —Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“Captivating . . . A cri de coeur for sympathy and understanding. This is an auspicious debut.”—Publishers Weekly

“Lyrical . . . [and] masterful . . . Perfect for fans of Kelly Link and of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, Joffre’s debut collection heralds the arrival of a new, exciting voice in fiction.”—Booklist

“Ruth Joffre’s stories are composed of equal parts brightness and secrecy. She turns the lights on all around her characters yet still permits them their mystery, so that beneath their sharp lines and vivid colors one senses something considerably darker and more enigmatic. They face you not like constructions on a page but like people in the world.”—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead

“Ruth Joffre is a fearless and startlingly talented writer. In these stories you’ll find the quiet horror of Mary Gaitskill and the reality-bending mischievousness of David Lynch and Kelly Link. You will leave this book gratefully unsettled.”—Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon

“So many of the characters in Ruth Joffre’s stories are, literally and figuratively, sleepwalking through ‘some dark and frightful dream that our minds had conjured,’ and it’s a testament to Joffre’s meticulous and abundant talent that she can guide the reader through these constrained and inhospitable spaces. No matter how dark the stories become, her language, so precise and beautiful, shines a light so that you can go deeper into these worlds, where no one else has ever been. A wonderful debut.”—Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang

“Hypnotic and elegant, Night Beast built to a resonance that resounds in me still. These stories are unforgettable, full of longing and hunger and alert tenderness. Finishing the collection was like waking from a night of disquieting and luminous dreams. I did not want this book to end.”—Anna Noyes, author of Goodnight, Beautiful Women

“The force of Night Beast is seismic; I was startled to read a first book so daringly original. Ruth Joffre’s dissident, imperiled characters are intricately drawn and deeply surprising. While working in the tradition of Djuna Barnes, Isak Dinesen, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Mary Gaitskill, Ruth Joffre manages to be sui generis, a singular young writer reconfiguring the possibilities of fiction at the dawn of —please gods—a dazzling career. There is nothing like her. And there never was.” —Alice Fulton, author of Barely Composed

From the Publisher

2018-02-20
Young, often queer characters search unsuccessfully for solace in this debut collection of stories.In the award-winning title story of Joffre's book, the narrator, Gemma, has fallen for her brother's bride-to-be, Sydney. The two women are carrying on a secret sexual affair—but only when Sydney is sleepwalking. Miserable on the day of the wedding, Gemma remembers their encounters: "I think part of me has always believed love should be like this—painful and hidden, only making itself known when you least expect it and are unprepared for the damage it can do." Again and again, Joffre's stories bear out this sentiment. In the collection's opener, "Nitrate Nocturnes," all people are born with timers in their wrists that count down how many years they have left before meeting their soul mates—but what happens when a glitch means one soul mate is ready for a relationship before the other? In "I'm Unarmed," an adolescent girl being molested by her male cousin, and navigating her first same-sex romance, leaves town after a violent attack on her abuser. In "Weekend," two avant-garde actors filming a long-running television show blur the lines between their real lives and those of their characters. The circumstances here are bleak: Men in the book are either oblivious or outright violent, but the women are rarely able to sustain more than fleeting comfort with each other. This hopelessness is underscored by a kind of narrative blurriness: Details in the stories get attention and then are abandoned, while seemingly crucial moments of motive or interiority are missing. The result is that the stories trap readers in a kind of disconcerting dream—by the time they're over, we feel a vague sense of melancholy without being quite sure why.Joffre's ideas are vibrant, but a lack of development mutes the book's effect.

Kirkus Reviews