Night Work

by Pete Duval

Buzzards Bay. November 1980. The commercial fishing vessel Padre Pio motors back to New Bedford with a haul of marijuana after a nighttime rendezvous with a drug freighter. Below deck hard-luck fisherman Duchand wakes before dawn. João, the ship’s devout Cape Verdean owner and captain, is missing, “gone over.” Duchand’s fellow crew members are not talking. And two men from the freighter are back on board wielding AK-47s. One of them is Berg, amateur theologian, absolute sociopath, and Duchand’s childhood friend. Missing for decades, Berg has resurfaced as liaison for suppliers seeking retail outlets along the East Coast. He’s frantic to find João’s rumored “ledger”— an illustrated chronicle of illegal activity along New Bedford’s seedy waterfront—and he’s wrongly convinced Duchand, for whom Joao has served surrogate father and spiritual guide, knows where it is. Duchand jumps ship. Armed now with João’s antique 9mm, a vial of amphetamines, and two sets of ancient rosaries, he plunges headlong into the moribund precincts of 1980s New Bedford in search of João’s ledger, a landscape of doomed informants, well-armed parish priests, and terminally ill saints-in-waiting—a journey that will lead to revelation and bloody apotheosis back out at sea.What folks are saying...“Part crime novel, part theological investigation, Pete Duval’s brilliant and riveting Night Work reads like some lost Melville story, dug out of an attic trunk and updated for the seedy harbors of New England in the 1980s. Both a haunting and an act of grace, this is a novel of incredible power.”

—Mark Powell, author of Hurricane Season and The Late Rebellion

“ Night Work is a speed-fueled fever dream of a novel, a breakneck thriller with the soul of a gothic ghost tale. Told in exuberant prose, it is a story that will haunt you long after you’ve read its final pages.”

—C. Matthew Smith, author of Twentymile

“Pete Duval stretches reality like a rubber band. And never lets it break. Night Work is a fascinating work that finds a home somewhere between the mirages of Heart of Darkness and the illusions of Angel Heart. It’s beautifully written, haunting, poetic, with all senses tingling. It’s also an edge-of-your-seat thriller with a main character that taunts the reader with his closeness and yet remains a teasing ‘other’. A strange book unlike anything current crime literature has to offer. A true gift.”

—M.E. Proctor, author of Love You Till Tuesday

“ Night Work is a contemplative thriller that leads the reader to the haunted edge along with its lead character Duchand. Pete Duval crafts an unrelenting story through a landscape of dark choices that will leave you with lingering ghosts.”

—Rob D. Smith, author of Good-looking Ugly

152 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2024

About the author

Pete Duval is a fiction writer and photographer. His newest book is Night Work, a crime novel set in 1980s New Bedford, Massachusetts. His short story collection, Rear View (Houghton Mifflin), won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, the Connecticut Book Award, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. A second collection, The Deposition, winner of the 2020 Juniper Prize for Fiction, was published by The University of Massachusetts Press in 2021. Other awards include Grain Magazine’s Short Grain fiction prize and Florida State University’s World’s Best Short-Short Story prize. Pete has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Collegeville Center for Ecumenical Research, and is the recipient of two Connecticut artist grants. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ascent, The Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, Chelsea, Exquisite Corpse, and Appalachian Heritage, among other venues. A street and landscape photographer, Pete lives in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia with his wife, daughter, and cats.

Reviews

[Thomas Trang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heart of Darkness in the North Atlantic

You really don't read many books like this one these days. A slim novella of otherworldly proportions. It has the sweaty desperate paranoia of Robert Stone and the scuzzy vibes of Denis Johnson.

I'm not sure about the second person narrative and the effect it had, and I saw the "twist" coming, but it doesn't lessen my admiration for Night Work. The writing is powerful and the imagery is haunting. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

[Drew Garland · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an insanely fast and wild ride. Felt like every time Duchand popped a speed pill I did too. Every time I looked up I had melted another 20 pages away. Second person really was not for me but other than that my only complaint is that I wanted to live in this world longer than just 130ish pages.

[Rod Hemingway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duval is among the best of word smiths. This book reminds me a lot of The Old Man and the Sea with descriptions so attended to that you can’t help but conjur up exactly the image that the author intends.

Characters steeped in misery like a long forgotten tea bag inhabit Night Work. You feel for Duchand and for João, but the feeling isn’t of the compassionate sort. It’s more like pity.

I can’t wait to read more by this author!

[Joshua Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

As in Duval's other award-winning short story collections, Rear View and The Deposition, his prose shines and shepherds the reader through a short novel of massive aesthetic proportions. The themes within Night Work are likewise themes that, with time, sink heavier and heavier into the soul. Indeed, Night Work is not only an action-packed thrill-ride of a book, but it also illustrates a theological and philosophical intensity that is rarely experienced in contemporary literature.

This novel's choice in second-person narration is, however, a misstep, I believe, as I felt that it actually thrusted me out the fictional dream and reduced the intimacy of narrative for me. Duval has a wonderful sense of the senses; thus, the physical and emotional descriptions are excellent and visceral. There is, however, something of a disagreeable self-hatred in the character, suggested by his frequent cogitations on and subsequent descriptions of skin color, in which anything lighter is always evil, ugly, or sick, and anything darker, perhaps "coffee-colored," is always good and enlightened to the point of deification. In this way, the subtextual social commentary was predictable for our zeitgeist and unfortunately unsavory. I would have preferred the story without its sometimes awkwardly heavy-handed takes on class as well.

Some have compared Duval's writing to certain authors. I would say that Night Work reads as a mix of Don DeLillo, Dennis Johnson, and Flannery O'Connor, with a pinch of Herman Melville sprinkled in. I would have preferred a story without so many foul words and grating language, too, but I suppose that a story calling for so much grit sometimes requires it.

Ultimately, this is just not my kind of fiction, but I can see Night Work as being truly transformative for others.

[Ilyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duval is a writing assassin.