Book of Night

Charlie Hall is bartending at the Rapture Bar & Lounge, where she is trying to make a fresh start. Nearby, a young woman is showing off her newly modified shadow. An old acquaintance, Doreen, arrives and asks for Charlie’s help tracking down her missing boyfriend, Adam. Adam has recently become engaged in the magical criminal activity that Charlie has left behind. Charlie agrees to help on the condition that Doreen use her connections to the university to help defer the student debt owed by Charlie’s sister, Posey. Using a fake name, Charlie texts Adam to verify that he is still alive. As Charlie wraps up and leaves the bar, she finds her car won’t start.

Charlie gets out and walks home. On her way, she sends a follow-up text to Adam detailing a book she wants him to steal. Then, she gets a text from her reliable boyfriend, Vince.

Suddenly, she encounters the torn-open body of a man who was in the bar. She sees the man’s attacker: a disembodied shadow with no hands. The shadow leaves, and Charlie runs home. When she arrives, Vince is sleeping and Posey is conducting an online tarot reading—“[therapy] for people who couldn’t admit they needed therapy” (16).

Vince is unusual because he has no shadow, which often elicits suspicion in others. He doesn’t talk about his past, but Charlie has deduced that he comes from a wealthy family. She wakes him and invites him to come to bed.

The narrative flashes back to Charlie’s adolescence. When Charlie was 13 years old, her mother married Travis, an unscrupulous and abusive man. Charlie decided to pretend to channel the ghost of a dead warlock to convince her mother of her new stepfather’s true nature. Charlie and Posey tried to find evidence of Travis’s misdeeds, and when they couldn’t find any, planted fake evidence. Their mother shortly ejected her husband but wanted Charlie to continue channeling the warlock. She brought Charlie to show her friends, and Charlie pretended to tell their future with the warlock’s powers.

In the present, Charlie wakes to find that Posey has stayed up all night, researching ways to “quicken,” or bring to life, her shadow. Shadow magic has become a mainstream wellness trend, sometimes with disastrous results. She tells Posey about the shadow murderer she saw the night before, but Posey doesn’t believe her. Posey also voices her distrust of Vince.

Later, Vince and Charlie go to her stalled car. Vince works on repairing it. She remembers someone who sold off their shadow and wonders how Vince feels about the loss of his shadow.

Adam returns her text and counters her job offer with one of his own: He wants to sell something anonymously and wants Charlie to be the face of the sale.

Odette, the owner of the bar, comes by and meets Vince. Charlie reflects on her criminal past of stealing valuable manuscripts containing techniques for shadow magic. Once, her former boyfriend Mark betrayed her and tried to sell an item she stole. She switched the item for a fake to get revenge, and Mark was punished by the client; they removed his shadow and his fingers.

Charlie remembers meeting Vince at the bar and going home with him. She found a photo of him with another woman in his wallet, which he keeps with him always.

Outside the bar, Charlie watches her old criminal boss, Balthazar, leave. She considers a recent rumor about him searching for a book called the Liber Noctem and wonders if that’s what Adam is trying to sell. She searches for it online and discovers it’s an old book of shadow magic being auctioned by Sotheby’s.

Charlie’s friend Barb arrives to drive her home but instead invites her to a party with many of their old acquaintances. Charlie agrees. The house party is filled with drunk people. Vince arrives later to join her and is welcomed by her old friends. One past hookup, Ian, questions Vince about his job cleaning gruesome scenes, trying to start a fight. Vince spins a story about cleaning up a body that was turned inside out. Later, a girl named Suzie tries to flirt with Vince.

Vince and Charlie go home and have sex.

Charlie arranges to meet Adam but secretly plans to steal the book from him. She believes he’s working for a man named Lionel Salt, on whom Charlie wants revenge for a past betrayal.

Later at work, Charlie reflects on the famous psychology experiment called the marshmallow test, in which children are given a marshmallow and promised a second if they can abstain from eating the first by exhibiting patience.

Charlie decides to learn more about the dead man she found, who may be connected to the priceless book, and goes into her manager’s office to find his bar receipt. The dead man was Paul Ecco, who ran a rare bookshop. Charlie calls the shop and pretends to be looking for a children’s book. The man who answers pretends to be Paul. Afterward, Charlie goes to see Balthazar, who runs an illegal shadow parlor under the bar. She tells him about the shadow man she met. Balthazar calls him the “hierophant,” a figure from tarot cards. She realizes he must be part of a local magician's guild called the Cabal. They govern shadow magicians and hunt Blights, or disembodied shadows who go rogue. Charlie asks Balthazar why he threw out Paul Ecco, and Balthazar becomes evasive.

When the bar is closing, a man enters asking for Charlie by her fake name. She realizes it’s the man from the bookshop who pretended to be Paul. The man menacingly sends his shadow toward her and then retracts it for effect.

The narrative flashes back to Charlie’s adolescence.

After Travis left, Charlie’s mother’s friend Rand came to see them. He knew about Charlie’s fake warlock and blackmailed her into helping him with a new scheme. They went to a party at a fancy house, where he made Charlie dress up like the household’s deceased daughter to pretend to be her ghost. Rand told the family he could help them connect with her. Charlie explored the dead girl’s room before making her ghostly appearance. Afterward, Rand congratulated her on her performance. The following week, Rand returned to get Charlie’s help with another job. If she refused, he threatened to tell her mother everything.