Talk about the role of the lightbulb, that small pear-shaped device, in changing the face of civilization. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Last Days of Night …then take off on your own:ġ. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff-or his defendant-became overwhelming. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose.

Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. The morning’s discrete images-a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse-could be assembled into a story. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain.

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore