I’ve long thought nobody writes queer coming-of-age tales of love and longing like Dale Peck. We’ve been waiting a decade for another novel and Night Soil delivers on every level and more. This is a parable for a dead modern world that’s built shakily atop an undying past, a mysterious family history where the personal and the political continually raise the stakes, and a lyrical modern mythology only a mind like Peck’s can produce. Art, nature, race, gender, sexuality, all of it is reexamined in this fiction 2018 and onward cannot afford to skip. Riveting, mesmerizing, haunting—the novel is so lucky to have Dale Peck back.