The stories in Millhauser’s spellbinding collection Voices in the Night are anchored by dark human yearnings — for perfection, or excitement, or some ungraspable form of fulfillment. These yearnings have a combustible quality, threatening to consume the towns and minds where a pervasive sense of unease provides the tinder ... Just when you think you recognize a myth, a character, a voice — the familiar tacks toward the strange and unexpected ... In Voices in the Night, Millhauser gives us worlds upon worlds — wistful and warped, comic and chilling — that by story’s end, feel as intimate as our own reflections.
Like much of Millhauser’s fiction, the work contained within this collection is both approachable and elusive, with narratives often opening in familiar settings before utilizing extremes as a means of delving into Millhauser’s preferred matrix of philosophical quandaries. Though the tales presented are diverse in style and content, most are firmly grounded in explorations of potent and often contradictory passions ... An amorphous sense of ennui permeates across many of Millhauser’s plots, but this is frequently counterbalanced by humor, perversion, mania, vanity, and desire ... In each of these stories Millhauser’s tone manages to fluctuate between absurdity, anger, dread, and contemplative thought without ever breaking the flow or mystique of the narrative ... Some of Millhauser’s most potent writing can be found in his humanistic retellings of popular mythologies and legends ... The collection is not only an enjoyable and thought-provoking addition to Millhauser’s oeuvre, but also a lesson on the flexibility of short stories.
Evanescent and bloody, obsessive and meditative, historical and futuristic, dystopian and romantic: Steven Millhauser's brilliant work thrives in the fecund, mucky cracks of human contradictions ... The 16 stories here revise traditional tales, entwine shadows of individual terror and community panic, and dazzle with nimble allegory ... Millhauser's characters seek improvement, order and happiness, usually finding or making trouble in the process ... Millhauser plays fluidly across genre — gothic, horror, hyperrealism, fables — and evokes not only his acknowledged influences, Nabokov and Mann, but also Poe, Calvino, Borges and Millet. In these stories he savors the perverse, morbid and dark.
Entire towns (albeit small ones) in Millhauser's geography take on a certain glow ... Let's call these stories borderline pieces — easily described as magical realism, or perhaps, turned on their heads, tales of realistic magic. However we might describe it, Voices in the Night is a smorgasbord of deftly created short fiction by a great imaginative talent. Millhauser stands tall in the company of a growing number of contemporary American masters of magic, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Aimee Bender and Kelly Link.
In several stories in his new collection, Voices in the Night, acclaimed author Steven Millhauser doesn’t so much defend the pervasiveness of unexplained phenomena in everyday existence as slyly report it. In off-kilter accounts of how ordinary life unravels mystically in small towns, and strange goings-on subtly or dramatically alter the townspeople’s behavior, Millhauser deploys a unnamed narrator—dutifully generous with details—who reports legend and fact with equal avidity ... In Voices in the Night, with its preponderance of concerned citizens faithfully reporting dissolution on Main Street through the mystical and macabre, Millhauser comes on like the bizarro world Sarah Orne Jewett we’ve all been waiting for, even if we didn’t know it ... Millhauser does so many different things so well in Voices in the Night, with several stories that can stand (and already have stood) on their own apart from the rest, he hardly needs to tie it all together at the end.
Three of the glories in Voices in the Night—Millhauser’s set of magic spells, masquerading as a collection of 16 new short stories—go by the names 'Elsewhere,' 'Arcadia' and 'Phantoms.' They belong to a fugal set of variations on a theme running through about half the tales, a pattern as variously realized as it is stringently upheld. In this handful of accounts, the storytelling takes the shape of objective reportage. The narrator presents a chronicle of unusual occurrences—or traumatic psychological conditions—going on in a familiar place, a town just like ours, a vicinity we recognize, someplace we gravitate to, as home.
The towns in Steven Millhauser’s stories are haunted. The characters — nearly all of them — are frenzied. They see phantoms, they fixate on surreal happenings, they hear voices in the night. But Millhauser isn’t a horror writer; his latest collection elegantly toes the line between the real and the surreal, and many of the stories examine how we attempt to collectively explain the unexplainable ... Like Fox Mulder, or even Wes Anderson, Millhauser is a delightfully playful truth-seeker who uses factual language not as a definitive descriptior, but as a jumping-off point for fuller understanding.
Although the new book may not end up as roundly praised as Dangerous Laughter...or We Others...it should nonetheless fix Millhauser’s reputation as one of the two or three best short story writers alive in America ... His fictions are unabashedly thought-experiments meant to lead the mind and spirit down a dangerous path toward pseudo-collective hysteria, encroaching mania, epistemological blindness, communal oblivion, Emersonian Americo-religious philosophical splintering, and the vertigo of rumor ... They are hilarious in the vein of Kafka, magical — that is to say not really magical at all — in the vein of Bruno Schulz, formally daring in the mode of Poe and Borges, although these similarities have been overstated ... there is an element of sameness to many of the stories. Sub-urban boredom, thwarted intellectuality, the machinations of small town wonderment or dread, these recur, even spiral, throughout.
Many of the stories in Voices in the Night are set in these Millhauserian towns; characters must process their encounters with the uncanny without breaking their rose-colored glasses ... In this collection as in others, Millhauser’s feats are just as outsize as Paul Bunyan’s; Voices in the Night is as intriguing as a naked mermaid, as disturbingly intoxicating as the fumes from charcoal briquettes.
He’s our national laureate of the weirdness of our normal lives. The 16 stories in his masterful new collection, Voices in the Night, riff on advertising copy, board reports, mythology and sports announcing. But within that breadth of styles he consistently prompts the reader to sense some shadowy but important news that’s about to be delivered ... Millhauser isn’t concerned with death so much as with the elements of human nature that are hard to articulate or that speak to our fears ... For all of its hauntedness and sense of biblical history, Voices in the Night is defined more by its playfulness; Millhauser tweaks genres and expectations like a carnival strongman bending steel bars.
In this vividly imaginative new collection of 16 stories, Pulitzer Prize–winner Millhauser (Martin Dressler) draws a gauzy curtain of hyper-reality over mundane events and creates an atmosphere of uneasiness that accelerates to dread. Millhauser establishes tense yet wondrous tones while never resorting to melodrama; his cool, restrained voice is profoundly effective ... This is a volume best read in small doses, since the voices throughout remain similar and the situations often echo one another. The cumulative effect is to transport the reader to an alternate world in which the uncanny lurks pervasively beneath the surface.
A master storyteller continues to navigate the blurry space between magic and reality in 16 comic, frightening, consistently off-kilter tales ... As a short story writer, Millhauser emerged in the ’70s with his sensibility fully formed, taking Bernard Malamud’s heady mixture of Jewish mysticism and urban life and expanding its reach to encompass palace courts and big-box suburbia. His strategy remains the same in this collection, but there’s little sign that his enthusiasm has weakened ... A superb testament to America’s quirkiest short story writer, still on his game.
