The first sentence of the collection is “Night, now.” Just those two syllables are enough to draw the reader into Aiken’s hypnotizing verbal rhythms.

Her skill with the language of folk tales-specifically the oral storytelling native to the British Isles-is unparalleled. But the other tales are soothing, suffused with un-saccharine sweetness and kind to their characters even while gently poking fun.Īiken’s prose is extraordinary, impossible to do justice to in this small space. Aiken refuses to put any kind of neat moral or story arc on these unpleasant events, insisting on troubling the reader. The sole exception is the very unsettling “Listening,” in which good people and innocent animals suffer for no reason at all.

Bad things do happen, but they’re never the focus. These quick, darting stories are rarely grim. The women are written to be identified with the men are written to be entertained by.

(Her ghosts and fairies are considerably easier to believe in than her romances.) But they’re all more or less the same: sweet, befuddled, somewhat put-upon, and self-involved. Indeed, many are shoehorned into stories that don’t especially need them. This is not to say that she neglects to write about men. With the necessary caveat that Aiken wrote what she knew-white, straight, cisgender women, poor and working-class women-her catalogue of British femaleness is impressively thorough. These include a slightly silly but firmly self-defined middle-aged woman, a misanthrope who takes in orphans and her shivering but unbowed fosterling, a sweet elderly lady slipping into dementia and her sniping daughter-in-law, a steely spinster who confronts the devil, half-wild young women in small villages, fairy queens who hide in forests and castles, and many more. ‘The room was too full of music.’ ”) And it brilliantly showcases Aiken’s affectionate, humorous, deft portrayals of female characters. The language is simply splendid, so evocative, as though the stories were actually very dense poems.

The juxtaposition of mundane and magical-an amateur poet who keeps imposing on his friends even from the afterlife, a puppy’s ghost trapped in an old storage box-feels effortless and fresh. There’s so much to love about this slender collection of stories by prolific fantasist Aiken (1924–2004), dating from 1955 to 1990 and inexplicably but charmingly arranged in alphabetical order by title.

Midnight is a Place by Joan Aiken