Books like Man in the dark by Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s novella follows August Brill as he lingers in his daughter’s Vermont home following a car crash. Sleepless and restless he conjures a surreal scenario where he is Owen Brick, a young magician awakening in a trench listening to distant battle cries. A sergeant named Serge helps him escape, and Brick learns that America is embroiled in a hidden civil war, with September 11 attacks and the Iraq war never having occurred. Various states have declared independence, and the conflict pits citizens against each other. Brill’s imagined mission is to kill a figure he calls Blake/Block/Black—a sleepless creator of endless war—who is not literally an enemy but a manifestation of August himself. Through absurdist dialogue and metafictional twists, the story questions the nature of conflict and imagination in contemporary America.

First publish date: 2008