Maureen Corrigan

In that tale, our narrator, a young engineer named Stephen, is coerced into accepting a transfer to a top-secret barbed wire facility on the coast.

In a du Maurier tale, a change of locale is always bad news.

When Stephen arrives at the facility, he's initiated into the secrets of an AI-type machine called Karen 3 that's designed with a built-in storage unit to entrap the life force that leaves the body on the point of death.

As the head scientist, perhaps mad, explains to Stephen...

If we succeed, we shall have the answer at last to the intolerable futility of death.

The breakthrough turns out to be indelibly mournful, more than terrifying.

Taken together, the 13 tales in After Midnight offer every shade of eerie.

Du Maurier's best stories here also affirm that art remains one of the few reliable forms of immortality.

Ocean Vuong's 2019 debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was one of those novels that made me silently pledge, I'll follow you anywhere, whatever you write. And so I have, into Vuong's 2022 poetry collection, Time is a Mother, and now his second novel. The Emperor of Gladness, like its predecessor, explores what Vuong has called in a recent interview, the loneliness of class movement.

Ocean Vuong's 2019 debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was one of those novels that made me silently pledge, I'll follow you anywhere, whatever you write. And so I have, into Vuong's 2022 poetry collection, Time is a Mother, and now his second novel. The Emperor of Gladness, like its predecessor, explores what Vuong has called in a recent interview, the loneliness of class movement.

Ocean Vuong's 2019 debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was one of those novels that made me silently pledge, I'll follow you anywhere, whatever you write. And so I have, into Vuong's 2022 poetry collection, Time is a Mother, and now his second novel. The Emperor of Gladness, like its predecessor, explores what Vuong has called in a recent interview, the loneliness of class movement.

Sprawling where its predecessor was compact, The Emperor of Gladness opens on a view, sweeping in time and space, of East Gladness, Connecticut, a town that manufacturing left behind. Our tour guides are the spirits of the place who speak to us in a collective voice.

Sprawling where its predecessor was compact, The Emperor of Gladness opens on a view, sweeping in time and space, of East Gladness, Connecticut, a town that manufacturing left behind. Our tour guides are the spirits of the place who speak to us in a collective voice.

Sprawling where its predecessor was compact, The Emperor of Gladness opens on a view, sweeping in time and space, of East Gladness, Connecticut, a town that manufacturing left behind. Our tour guides are the spirits of the place who speak to us in a collective voice.

Follow the train tracks, the ghosts advise, till they fork off and sink into a path of trampled weeds leading to a junkyard packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia. Furred with ivy, their dented hoods pooled with crisp leaves, they are relics of our mislearning.

Follow the train tracks, the ghosts advise, till they fork off and sink into a path of trampled weeds leading to a junkyard packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia. Furred with ivy, their dented hoods pooled with crisp leaves, they are relics of our mislearning.

Follow the train tracks, the ghosts advise, till they fork off and sink into a path of trampled weeds leading to a junkyard packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia. Furred with ivy, their dented hoods pooled with crisp leaves, they are relics of our mislearning.

If the novel's opening calls to mind Thornton Wilder glazed with Springsteen, what happens next reads like Vuong's nod to Frank Capra and his classic 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. Our main character, a 19-year-old depressed Vietnamese-American boy named Hai, stands on the town bridge. Hai has lied to his immigrant mother.

If the novel's opening calls to mind Thornton Wilder glazed with Springsteen, what happens next reads like Vuong's nod to Frank Capra and his classic 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. Our main character, a 19-year-old depressed Vietnamese-American boy named Hai, stands on the town bridge. Hai has lied to his immigrant mother.

If the novel's opening calls to mind Thornton Wilder glazed with Springsteen, what happens next reads like Vuong's nod to Frank Capra and his classic 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. Our main character, a 19-year-old depressed Vietnamese-American boy named Hai, stands on the town bridge. Hai has lied to his immigrant mother.