Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

I admit that I read a great many of these stories before finally breaking down and inter-library loaning this title. It was so worth it. These stories are like a punch to the side of the head. Sometimes they are so strange, they put the reader in that uncomfortable place in which there is no way of knowing which way the story will unfold. Honestly, I loved it. Loory takes inanimate objects and makes them magical and scary (a swimming pool, a balloon, a rope). Of course, it's never really the object that is scary...it's the human's reaction to it. If I HAD to pick a favorite, it would be The Book. But Girl in a Storm and many others would be a close second. This is a great collection. I recommend reading one or two stories a day with a giant pause in between for reflection.

this book is nuts, its whimsical and dark, thought provoking and mind blowing....its a fricken contradiction that i thoroughly enjoyed...

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day: Because it was a much better title than Things That Make You Go Hmmm. At it's heart, that's what Ben Loory's collection is though, stories that make you wonder, think, and occasionally leave you confused.

In simple language and with as few words as possible, Loory weaves these fables with unnamed characters and a child-like voice. A skydiving moose and a duck that falls in love with a rock, a walking tree and a tv that talks, UFOs, Martians, and an octopus in the city: these are some of the oddities that await the reader. Some of the stories seem to be written for the fun of it; some are more poignant. All of them are a great distraction from the books we read the other 364 days of the year. Yes, Stories for Nighttime... can easily be read in a day; perhaps it would be more pleasurable in smaller doses, however. We could all use a flight through space or a talk with an animal or a canvas on which we can paint our imaginations. Perhaps it's just what we need to start every day.