An Intimate Knowledge of the Night

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An Intimate Knowledge of the Night is a work of horror fiction by Terry Dowling, first published in 1995. The structure is that of a short story collection with a framing narrative, but the work has an overall unity that has led to it being considered a novel by some. The volume won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel in 1996.

Terry Dowling had published many stories with elements of fear and haunting prior to 1995, but An Intimate Knowledge of the Night was the first of his works to concentrate almost exclusively on horror. An ambitiously literary work, it presents a series of chilling reality-testings that deal with rapture, fear, and the secret, darkest mysteries of the world and the human spirit. The framing narrative concerns an author who sits down to write the linking pieces for the stories in his new book, planning to do it by the hours of the night observed by medieval scholars; he is soon interrupted by phone calls from Ray, a former mental patient obsessed with finding order in a chaotic psychic landscape. Dowling's express agenda in his writing is that of creating for his readers a resacralization of the world that works for them, that jerks them out of their quotidian slumber, that awakens them to the infinite possibility immanent in the world and its variety. This essentially moral purpose, although possibly unfashionable in postmodern times, is effective in the hands of a writer as skilled as Dowling.