Nightfall, by John Inman

[Ulysses]

Nightfall
By John Inman
Dreamspinner Press, 2018
Four stars

This whole book is a dewy-eyed romance inside an apocalyptic dystopia (see how smart that makes me sound?). The surprise, however, is that the apocalypse is merely a tool in the aid of the romance. It is a window into the darker parts of the human mind/heart/soul, against which the evolving love of Ned and Joe creates an intense, bright and shiny contrast.

Ned Bowden is a damaged boy, suffering from a lifetime of shame and worse. He has sought shelter in San Diego, where he is a fry-cook in a delicatessen owned, with some charming incongruity, by a Chinese family named Wong (a Chinese restaurant would be a lot more work). Joe Chase, a wee bit older than Ned, has been a loner and emotionally isolated all his life, due to a childhood in foster care. His haven is as a groundskeeper at the San Diego Zoo. (As a side note, I visited this zoo just a month ago, for the first time in fifty(!) years. It is one of the most beautiful zoos in the world, and an important global research center for both rare plants and animals. It becomes a major setting in the story.)

These two lonely, shy men happen to meet in the modest apartment complex they both inhabit. At first, I was rolling my eyes over the coy restraint these two handsome, virile twenty-somethings exhibited toward each other. However, I thought about it, and realized that neither one has ever been loved – or had any kind of intimacy with another person. In spite of their adulthood, they are innocents, emotionally and physically. I was that way once, and I realized that Inman has put his finger on something that romance writers rarely bother with: we all start somewhere.

The oddest part of this book is the almost secondary importance of the terrifying, blood-red darkness that envelopes the earth. Inman goes into some detail about what causes this, and its effects on the world. I admit I wondered if his science is sound, but I guess sci-fi doesn’t need to be scientific so much as plausible, and I was convinced enough to be completely creeped out and on edge as I read this. Inman builds suspense and anxiety with a pro’s flair. I suppose this whole book is also an all-too apt metaphor for the upside-down world we’re living in right now.

At the end, I wanted to know more about the aftermath. Inman wraps things up nicely, and this is where the whole political metaphor becomes more apparent (at least to me). But I had questions that could have been answered, and would have made for a somewhat more richly satisfying conclusion that went beyond the romance and fed the reader’s inner sci-fi geek. It sort of reminded me of the ending of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” which scared the bejeezus out of me as a kid, and yet which ends in an oddly inconclusive way. Let me know what you think.