![]() Each tale sings with the distinct voice of its creator, and all are worthy reads in their own right-an appreciation of Hopper isn’t necessary to enjoy all they have to offer. Robert Olen Butler’s “Soir Bleu” depicts, like Hopper’s painting, a mime smoking a cigarette-no story featuring that scene could end well. Their victims soon perish without food or water, and the couple lives off whatever small fortune they find in the pockets of the dead. Stephen King, with his delightfully twisted perspective, studied Hopper’s painting of two spiritless-looking people sitting in their music room and imagined a Depression-era couple who kidnaps wealthy out-of-towners and holds them hostage in a closet. Her mental struggle over whether she should remain in such a noxious-albeit lucrative-relationship drives the story forward. Joyce Carol Oates’s young female protagonist is coerced by her married lover into living alone in a small room. With its hardboiled edge, Connolly’s story is also the collection’s most noir-ish, but nearly all convey dark themes. ![]() It’s a highlight in an altogether excellent anthology. Here Connolly stopped short of a million, but the words he did write are packed with suspense and emotional complexity. “I think I could write a million words about it,” she says to the narrator. Told from the perspective of a hired private investigator, “Nighthawks” opens on a young woman sitting on a bench at the Art Institute, admiring Hopper’s dramatic use of color. Then there are those like Connolly’s “Nighthawks,” in which the paintings themselves make appearances. Others, like King’s “The Music Room,” are only tangentially related. Some of them, like Oates’s “The Woman in the Window,” feature prominently scenes found in Hopper’s work. The stories share titles with their source paintings, but each has a different relation to the art. This painting and selected others by Hopper served as inspiration for seventeen writers-including Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Michael Connolly, and former host of the Late Late Show, Craig Ferguson-who all contributed to one of the year’s most engaging volumes, In Sunlight or In Shadow, edited by Lawrence Block. There’s no visible entrance to the place, leaving viewers to wonder how the lonely-looking patrons got in-and how they’ll get out. You know the image: Three customers-two men in fedoras and a red-haired woman-sit lost in their thoughts in a harshly-lit diner while outside its large window an empty street unfurls into shadow. In a gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago hangs Edward Hopper’s most famous painting, Nighthawks.
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