... pure Gothic horror, filled with phantoms and demons and other avatars of the uncanny ... Mr. Cameron’s ability to flicker between the eerie and the grubbily banal defines his fascinating recent project of revising classic literary genres ... The novel’s indeterminacy is both intriguing and moving, because it means that one character’s loss is another’s consummation, and an unbroken night is both a source of terror and the condition of a long-desired resting place,
... [a] masterpiece ... while [Cameron's] previous books have most often explored relationships between gay men, both with each other and with their own selves, this new novel—suspenseful and almost hallucinatory—is at least at first glance a departure in terms of subject and setting, but thankfully not in style ... The magical quality of Cameron’s prose comes is tethered to a precise language of interior reality rather than specificity of place, and the cold, bleak city where his characters arrive in the masterful opening chapter is as vaguely described as its characters’ emotional states are exhaustively chronicled ... Cameron renders his images delicately and purposefully, allowing odd and memorable details to accrue into a kind of mosaic—but this is a mosaic that has been left deliberately incomplete, the missing pieces all the more glaring and unsettling for their absence. No truth can be taken for granted as such, and events often take place off the page in order to instill a sense of disorientation in the reader to match that of the novel’s characters. And many important moments in the narrative happen in the dark, as if to crowd the emotional depth of the story with too many physical details would be unseemly—or perhaps to heighten the sense of unreality, to highlight the perpetual presence of danger ... if Cameron paints a picture that’s sometimes as bleak as the landscape against which the events of What Happens at Night are cast, there’s also the promise of an eventual arrival at a place of hope—or maybe what could be better described as acceptance, a way to live with the wisdom that has now been so agonizingly hard-earned. The train eventually leaves the forest in the end, the view from the window suddenly bright and clear. And the final line of this brilliant gift of a novel is a punch to the gut, as well as an almost Rilkean call to action.
The claustrophobic setting somehow brilliantly and counterintuitively creates the space for Cameron (Coral Glynn, 2012) to expand the interiority of his characters ... This willingness to construct a consciousness out of language shares a sensibility with such mid-century European masters as Stefan Zweig and Robert Walser and rewards close reading.
...cascades into a series of Waiting for Godot-esque moments in which anticipation is frequently met with frustration and further delay ... It’s a weirdly compelling mix of all the elements that make us human and all the situations that test our humanity.
...a menacing, suspenseful novel ... A vaguely surreal setting...and fellow residents at the hotel who are either mysterious or too intimate by turns create a sense of unease ... the novel will keep readers on tenterhooks, wondering how the tension will break.
A snow-swept journey to the ends of the Earth continues Cameron's exploration of defamiliarized landscapes and the intricacies of human relationships ... A dreamy fable confronting love, death, and our inevitable inadequacy yet persistence in the face of both.
...dreamlike, resonant ... Cameron doles out the right amount of eeriness and eccentricity ... A torpor hangs over the events and protagonists, who respond passively to the bizarre world around them. While the idiosyncratic setting can sometimes serve as a foil for the couple, their response makes Cameron’s admirable tale emotionally affecting.
