Christopher Stoddard

At Night Only Christopher Stoddard

A producer at an advertising firm, whose gender and name are never revealed, recounts a disturbing tale of emotional fixation and eventual rejection by the two key figures in their life, leaving them bereft of self-esteem and violently desperate. The first of these obsessions is a promiscuous yet charismatic underground art star whose psychic power and extreme drug use draw the main character into a disorienting world of gallery openings and sex-fueled parties. The second, a handsome actor narcissistically preoccupied with his budding movie career, offers moments of sex and tenderness punctuated by irrational tirades of anger, before he tires of the main character's overweening love and threatens abandonment.

Both these relationships weave their harrowing stories against a brilliantly evoked background of contemporary Brooklyn and Manhattan, a place where advertising and consumption have even corrupted the language we use to speak about love. At Night Only is a tragedy that could only be written in this new millennium.