Ten Novels That Follow Nighttime Logic

(Kelly Link, following the lead of Howard Waldrop, distinguishes between three kinds of story logic: dream logic, daytime logic, and nighttime logic. The idea is that a sequence of events has dream logic when at the end you say, “This happened, and then this happened, and it doesn’t make any sense.” With daytime logic, you say, “This happened, and then this happened, and it makes sense, and I can explain why.” And with nighttime logic, you say, “This happened, and then this happened, and it makes sense, and I can’t explain why.” In other words, daytime logic produces a logical, causal kind of sense, while nighttime logic produces a more mysterious, emotional kind of sense. Dream logic produces motion but not sense. This list of novels (and a few story collections) that follow nighttime logic is by request, and arranged in something like their order of popularity, from the most widely read to the least.)

 

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

  • The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka

  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

  • Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

  • Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

  • The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis

  • The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck

  • Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

  • Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët

  • The Other Side of the Mountain by Michel Bernanos

— March 10, 2022


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