Book Review - Morning Is Dead by Anderson Prunty

I think that American Horror Story's first season can attest to the fact that when strange things occur during your story, you have to somehow explain it later on. That show had lots of 'splaining to do once the first episode finished its two hour run of multitudinous ghosts, goblins, and freaky old women (like Constance). So it's important to note that when things get all spacey within a story, there's got to be some realistic (or at least, sensible) explanation for the whole thing. In Morning Is Dead by Anderson Prunty, the plot is thick with strange and supernatural occurrences, but it's missing the essence of why these things need to be in the novella in the first place.

The book centers around a small town, and the main character, Alvin. Alvin's chronicles are a bit mystifying and are difficult to explain in one succinct paragraph, so I'll abbreviate a little bit: he's sucked into a night world of his former town, which is now populated by drug-addled cops, irradiated humans, and demolition men who are trying to blow up his house, with his wife still in it. At the same time, the novel continues to cut away to a hospital room, where Alvin sleeps in a coma while his wife April reflects on what happened.

The novel is very fast-paced, and it has to be to incorporate all of the ideas that Prunty has for this night world. It's also very short, which means that we don't get to spend a lot of time with people like April, who is mostly mentioned by Alvin but is not developed beyond a means for expositional dialogue. There are also a few people that recur in Alvin's exploits, but again, their characterization is merely two-dimensional, briefly envisioned figures that help Alvin along his dark path.

Prunty has strange ideas that feel like a lucid dream state, but there are too many of them. So many strange things occur at once, without our protagonist feeling lost or confused, that they are all hard to accept, and most of them have little actual meaning in the full structure of the narrative. Instead, they often feel like added weirdness to a novella full of the strange, things that make Morning Is Dead as explicitly odd as possible. I don't think it's an awful thing, but I do feel like Prunty goes a bit too far since most of the ideas never really sprout plot lines.

Thankfully, the little vignettes that pop back into the normalcy of the real world at the hospital with April help to dispel some of the overwhelming bits of the night world that we don't understand. It all leads up to a twist, one that is almost evident from the start but is just veiled enough where the climax doesn't feel like a letdown. Still, in some ways, it's unfortunate that Prunty doesn't explore the possibilities of others finding this night world. Perhaps... well, I'll leave you to your own imagining of what the ending signifies.

Morning Is Dead is a fun read, but its hidden ideas can get a little aggravating, especially when Prunty never really takes the time to define the rules of this night world. Some of the dialogue is painful to read, but it's made up for with delightfully disturbing scenes including a violent sex act so heinous it fits in just right with Prunty's writing style. But Morning Is Dead struggles to balance the strange with the real, and it often leaves the reader wishing there was a little more thought put into the story rather than the creative creatures that populate it.