I was recording an episode of the podcast this week with Andrew Farkas when the conversation turned to the subject of writers equally versed in writing fiction and plays. Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, and Anton Chekhov are two writers who made impressive contributions to both fields, but moving closer to the present day it’s more challenging to find writers with one foot in each format.

That doesn’t mean that the two are entirely walled-off from one another. Zadie Smith and Norman Lock have both written plays in addition to their prose, as has the aforementioned Mr. Farkas. This conversation put me in mind of another literary figure known equally well for his work for the page and the stage: J.B. Priestley.

Priestley is best known for his play An Inspector Calls, a work of mystery with a tinge of possibly supernatural menace to it. His dramatic work is not the entirety of his bibliography, though: recently, Penguin Random House is in the process of reissuing several of his novels in stylish new editions. Another of Priestley’s novels, 1927’s Benighted, was published in the U.K. as part of the Penguin Horror imprint; readers on this side of the Atlantic can buy an edition via Valancourt Books.

Benighted is a fine work of Gothic menace. (It’s also been filmed twice under the title The Old Dark House.) The premise is simple: a group of friends take refuge from cataclysmic weather in a remote home, where they discover that their unexpected hosts, the Femm family, have plenty of secrets, some of them lethal. The events of the novel play out over the course of a few hours, adding to the sense of fatigue that the heroes are facing and adding another layer to the suspense on hand.

It is only now that I’m realizing that the book’s title is a pun: the action of Benighted plays out over the course of a night, after all. (I am often bad with puns. I have a story here that illustrates that very well, but it’s far too embarrassing to share.) There are a few other aspects of this novel that head into unexpected waters, including the traumatic effects of the First World War on several of its characters. (Credit to this Emily St. James essay for getting me to look for details in this vein.) And there are bleakly comic moments, as when one character observes of the Femm patriarch Sir Roderick:

“You’ve never heard of him. But he’s in there. He’s the master of the house really and was once tremendously important, but is now very old and infirm and is somewhere upstairs, invisible and ungetatable. When you come to think of it, he’s rather like God.”

A very different story of surreal events playing out over the course of one night takes place in Dan Kois’s novel Hampton Heights, published 97 years after Priestley’s. This novel is (accurately) subtitled “One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.” I’d written about Kois’s previous novel Vintage Contemporaries in 2023; both of these novels do a precise job of evoking the recent past without overdoing it. Stylistically, they’re light-years apart, revealing an impressive range for Kois’s fiction.

Hampton Heights fits together three distinct approaches to storytelling. If you read enough early-20th century weird fiction, you’ll be familiar with the first: a group of friends or compatriots having supernatural-tinged adventures while apart. There’s a big difference in this novel in that the setting for these characters’ reunion is a Wisconsin Burger King as opposed to a posh gentleman’s club, but the overall motif is similar.

There’s also a school of writing about, essentially, immigrants to the U.S. bringing mythological creatures with them. This is most clear in the first vignette, in which the boys’ supervisor Kevin picks up a woman at a bar and discovers that she has a connection to a deep strand of folklore from far across the Atlantic. The same motif recurs in different forms throughout the novel, and it sparks friction with the third general sensibility at work here, which is to say 1980s nostalgia. As mentioned earlier, Kois doesn’t lay things on too thick, but there are moments — including an arcade sequence involving the game Paperboy — that may summon up high-scoring memories from some readers.

Throughout Hampton Heights, Kois doesn’t shy away from certain real-world unpleasantness: the paperboys are a diverse group, and they find plenty of bigotry — both spoken and unsaid — as they make their way across the neighborhood where they’re seeking to add subscribers. That also adds a bittersweet quality to this book: several of the institutions that were going strong in the late 1980s have lost their hold on things by now. It might well be that the passage of time is the most sinister monster of them all.