Waves of Light and Darkness

In the ever-crowded landscape of contemporary short fiction, John K. Danenbarger’s Waves of Light and Darkness emerges as a sharp, unapologetically cerebral collection that demands the reader’s full attention. As someone who has spent two decades dissecting the “next big thing,” I’ve grown weary of the minimalist trend that prioritizes style over substance. Danenbarger, thankfully, leans in the opposite direction, offering a tapestry of stories that are as emotionally heavy as they are intellectually rigorous.

The collection functions like a literary kaleidoscope. Each turn of the page shifts the perspective, moving from the cold, cosmic loneliness of an astrophysicist to the intimate, suffocating grief of a bookstore owner. The prose is dense, occasionally requiring a second pass to fully digest the philosophical underpinnings, but the payoff is consistently worth the effort.

Take, for instance, the opening story, “The Yellow Butterfly.” We meet a man whose world has been hollowed out by the sudden death of his wife, Leona. Danenbarger captures the visceral nature of grief with startling clarity: “He turned up the volume on sad music… and while it played, he screamed the line from the chorus: ‘I’d lie in the ground with you in the darkness’”. The protagonist is a man of science—a cosmologist—who finds himself “lost in thought, in deep need of an awakening”. His subsequent encounter with a woman named Hypatia in a nocturnal café blurs the lines between reality and simulation, questioning whether we are merely “lines of code in a cosmic program” or the architects of our own meaning.

What struck me most as a reviewer in mid-career—a time when one starts to count the years remaining rather than the years past—is the recurring theme of the “remainder.” In the aptly titled story “The Remainder,” Wilfred Blackwood navigates the “geography of unspoken history” after a diagnosis that makes his calendar feel like “science fiction”. The way Danenbarger describes Wilfred’s realization that “absurdity and meaning were not opposites but dance partners” is one of the most poignant observations on mortality I’ve read in years.

The collection isn’t without its darker, more jarring edges.

“Fragments of Existence” opens with the cold steel of a knife in a parking lot, a moment of terror that leaves “another ghost” on the protagonist’s skin. This shift from the metaphysical to the brutally physical keeps the collection from feeling too detached or academic.

At 298 pages, Waves of Light and Darkness is a substantial meal. It’s a book for those who don’t mind a little dirt under the fingernails of their philosophy. Danenbarger reminds us that while “the stars we study…are already dead by the time we see them,” we are still here, “coddiwompling along,” searching for the music in the equations. It’s a masterful work that proves, even in the darkness, there is a pulse.