8 Ominous Stories That Will Leave You on the Edge of Your Seat

By Megan Staffel

When the ominous appears in fiction, it increases anticipation and deepens empathy. As readers watch a character struggle with a feeling of unease caused by people or events, it offers them the pleasure of intimacy. Like the character, they have, in their own lives, questioned if something that urges wariness is real or imagined. As the matter is resolved for the character, the reader will feel catharsis. 

Sometimes readers meet unease in the opening chapters, and sometimes it appears throughout, never lessening until a final, breathtaking finish as in the three stories on my list, ‘Audition,” “Solo Works for Piano,” and “Bartow Station.” But regardless of how often or where unease descends, it’s a powerful magnet for readers who come to fiction not only for the enjoyment a well-made story or novel provides, but to find company in the loneliness caused by a troubling darkness in their own lives. 

Interview: Ron Nyren on “The Book of Lost Light”

By Kenneth Caldwell

I met Ron Nyren in the early 1990s when we worked together in the marketing department of a midsized architecture firm. I knew his passion was fiction and was happy for him when he went to an MFA program. When he returned to the Bay Area, he received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. We began working together again, and we exchange emails about work-related topics several times a week. I knew he was working on a novel and would inquire occasionally, but didn’t want to intrude. When I found out that it was going to be published, I wanted to throw a party and invite all my friends! But given the pandemic, the second best thing (and perhaps the better idea anyway) was to interview him via Zoom about the novel and its process.

Art in Fiction Author Spotlight: Ron Nyren

The spotlight is on Ron Nyren, author of The Book of Lost Light (Photography), an historical novel that explores family loyalty and betrayal, Finnish folklore, the nature of time and theater, and what it take to recover from calamity. Find out why Ron decided to write The Book of Lost Light, the role played in the novel by Finnish folklore, his favorite book as a teen and more.

Why did you decide to write The Book of Lost Light? What got your imagination working on overdrive?

I was thinking of turning a short story draft into a novel—a contemporary story in which a boy was being photographed, but I didn’t know why. I read about Sally Mann, whose photographs of her children in the nude caused a stir in the 1990s, but ultimately that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in. I remembered another story that I’d drafted years earlier about a boy who grew up being photographed by his father every day of his life in an effort to capture time. Things started to click when I thought of setting the story earlier in the history of photography: Arthur Kylander, a protégé of Eadweard Muybridge, aims to document the growth of his son, Joseph, by photographing him every day, assisted by Joseph’s headstrong cousin Karelia, who herself becomes a photographer in the pictorialist style. Once the 1906 earthquake came to mind, I had a doorway into my story.

Full Stop: A Conversation with Harriet Scott Chessman

Ron Nyren: How does research inspire your fiction—do you do a lot of it up front, or do you research as you write?

Harriet Scott Chessman: I do both. With Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper and The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas, it was the art that I fell in love with first. I was lucky to have access to brilliant scholarship about Cassatt, especially Nancy Mowll Mathews’ Mary Cassatt: A Life, and Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters. And there’s a wonderful catalogue, Degas and New Orleans: A French Impressionist in America. As I was trying to figure out my subject, and then all during the writing, I looked at all kinds of stuff: maps, newspapers, letters, journals, fiction, historical accounts—whatever helped me imagine these characters’ worlds. But I’d also say that, for both of these novels about art, my primary resource was always the paintings themselves. I would pore over them, with my characters in mind, trying to understand how, in a sense, the paintings themselves were telling stories. What was the starting point for The Book of Lost Light?

The only thing I had to begin with was a “What if?”—what if a boy grew up being photographed every day of his life as part of a project to capture the passage of time? I thought it would be set in contemporary times, but I didn’t know what the purpose of the project might be. For a long time, I was hunting for the story. Then I thought of Eadweard Muybridge, the man who pioneered the photography of motion in the 1870s. I started by reading everything I could about him, and I thought, what if my photographer were a former protégé of Muybridge? I gave various drafts of the early chapters to my novelist spouse, Sarah Stone, and to the rest of my writers’ group. More characters fell by the wayside until I settled on my central trio—Arthur, the photographer; Joseph, his son who tells the story; and Karelia, Joseph’s older cousin. And then early on I knew I wanted to include the 1906 earthquake and fire in this story of a man who’s trying to create an enduring record of time.

Fiction Writers Review: Between Realism and Something Else: An Interview with Ron Nyren

By Margot Livesey

When I suggested to Ron Nyren that we have a conversation about his absorbing debut novel, The Book of Lost Light, I realized that I could no longer remember when he and I first met. Our lives were already intertwined through several writerly connections, notably Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter, and his spouse, Sarah Stone. Ron reminded me that he and Sarah had come to a reading I gave in San Francisco. The three of us wound up taking a walk near the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which contains a number of the remarkable Eadweard Muybridge photographs that play a vital part in The Book of Lost Light (Black Lawrence Press). Since then, we’ve kept in touch in the way writers do, around work and reading and shared passions.

Research Notes: The Book of Lost Light (from Necessary Fiction)

My novel The Book of Lost Light came to me initially in the form of a question: what if a man set out to photograph his son every day of his life from birth onwards? That’s all I had to go on. I didn’t know why the man was carrying out this project, why it would matter, or what might happen as a result. The gears only started turning when I thought of setting the novel in the past, when people were still in the early phases of figuring out how photography could represent the world.

As I researched, I found one set of photographers exploring the camera’s ability to document the physical world in new and more precise ways, another pursuing the expressive and artistic possibilities that the camera opened up. These two very different approaches to seeing the world fascinated me and sparked the creation of two of my primary characters: Arthur Kylander, a photographer intent on documenting the passage of time, and Karelia, his impulsive niece, who helps raise Arthur’s son Joseph — the book’s narrator — after the death of Joseph’s mother.

Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors shed light on their recently released books by comparing them to weird things. This week Ron Nyren writes about his debut novel, The Book of Lost Light, out now from Black Lawrence Press.

If The Book of Lost Light were a timepiece, it would be the carved wooden owl clock I kept on my desk in childhood, tiny numerals etched in place of eyelashes. The left eye tracked the hour, the right tracked the minute. At night, I listened to it whittle off seconds inside its head as I tried to fall asleep, wondering what it was thinking.

If The Book of Lost Light were an artists’ hangout, it would be Coppa’s, San Francisco, 1906: high ceilings, two dozen tables, red wallpaper covered with chalk drawings—a gigantic lobster standing on an island named Bohemia, an acrobat stretching out his tongue for spaghetti he dangled from his feet, Father Time balancing an hourglass on one finger and a wine bottle on the other—all contributed by the artists and writers who haunt the place for its cheap pasta.