Wild Night by Patrick Lee: Let’s Take This Novella Apart and Look at It

So, to celebrate finishing Silver Circle, I read “Wild Night” by Patrick Lee, which seemed like a good choice because it’s difficult to start reading again after a serious hiatus, even a voluntary hiatus, at least for me. This is a novella, about 200 pages, high tension, fast paced, happy ending, neat concept, so I figured it would work to break the hiatus and it did.

And this was an interesting story, so I’m going to talk about it in some detail and pull it apart, so plenty of spoilers are going to be included. If you don’t want spoilers, stop here.

Okay, here’s the concept: there’s a skyscraper with a zoo on the top three floors. This is a really neat zoo with lots of great design. Let’s not discuss the practicality of this idea, just accept that there is this zoo on the top three floors of a skyscraper. In order to get permission to build this zoo, highly secure facilities were mandated, so the zoo locks up tight like a vault at night. This zoo offers schools a program so that eighty kids from the school can spend the night camping in the zoo (with adult supervision). I’m sure you can see this coming – and if not, the book description makes it clear – but on this particular night, the kids find themselves locked in with every enclosure opened.

This setup is just about irresistible as long as you’re pretty sure there’s going to be a happy ending. I was pretty sure, and there is indeed a happy ending. There are many daring escapes, and, here’s the first major spoiler, not even one kid gets killed.

Now let’s take an in-depth look at this story. Here’s the first sentence:

Grace Eldred was one of the most dangerous people on Earth, and on the first day of summer vacation, Jordan Clay made an enemy of her.

What do you think of that first line? I think it’s quite good. Why is Grace Eldred so dangerous and what does Jordan Clay do that makes her an enemy? I do think this line could be better in two ways: (a) my very first assumption was that Grace Eldred was a schoolmate of Jordan’s. I thought she was a child. This is not the case. It’s a few pages before we find out that Grace is not a schoolmate, but an adult crazy sociopathic vicious wanna-be killer. Also, (c) “one of the most dangerous people on Earth” is seriously overstating things. You don’t want Grace after you, but there are great whopping huge numbers of people who are, objectively speaking, much more dangerous than she is.

Yet, overall, I think this is a good line. We get that line as a teaser, it’s a good teaser, then we step back and sketch the scene:

A minute before all the bad stuff started happening, Jordan was finishing off a mint chip ice cream cone and debating dog names. She and her two best friends, Paz Reyes and Kayla Martin, were standing in line for the Arachnid, the newest ride at Thunder Cove Amusement Park.

It’s impossible that Patrick Lee used a line like “A minute before all the bad stuff started happening” thoughtlessly. He is signaling that the protagonist is a kid. That’s why he’s using really simple vocabulary.

The Arachnid is a horrifying ride where a giant central mechanism with eight arms reaches down and grabs, in its claws, eight large transparent balls, each of which holds a couple of passengers. (Daring passengers who are not risk-adverse.) The Arachnid picks up the balls and spins around, then sets the balls down. I doubt this is a reasonable design for an amusement park ride; 100% of readers probably share my doubt, and sure enough, things go wrong because Grace Eldred hacks the ride and threatens to cause the Arachnid to drop the balls from a hundred feet up unless her demands are met. Her demands are totally unimportant; Grace is largely unimportant as a person; she’s a scary villain, and good for Patrick Lee, as I am right there for uncomplicated evil villains who are plot devices rather than real people.

And I want to point out that simplifying Grace Eldred is one way Lee keeps this story short. If he had tried to build up her backstory and create her as a real person, that would have added considerable length. Leaving her as a scary but flat bad guy is also a decision that works well for a story aimed at MG readers, and with protagonists who are thirteen, that’s the readership Lee has in mind – MG, not YA – and that’s one reason I was so confident we wouldn’t wind up with bodies everywhere.

Before Grace can carry out her threat to drop one ball in order to prove she means business, Jordan spots her, jumps down from the entry line of the ride, races though the amusement park and into the parking lot, jumps up on her van, kicks loose the antenna through which Grace is controlling the Arachnid, smashes the control mechanism, and saves the day. And there is much rejoicing and Jordan is an overnight hero, with her name on everyone’s lips, and guess who is mad? Grace, of course, who gets away.

And here Lee has set up a fairly believable scenario because his villain is (a) a scary sociopathic wanna-be killer, and (b) good at hacking computer systems to wreak havoc, and (c) furious at Jordan. So this leads smoothly into a situation where, after the school year starts, Jordan’s school wins the lottery to have some kids spend the night in the Skyline Zoo, with Jordan and two best friends selected to go, and obviously the reader is already quite clear on what’s going to happen.

Lee compresses time to leap over the rest of the summer, another way in which he reduces wordcount while moving ahead with the actual story, so there are all kinds of techniques Lee is using in this story — teaser line, vocabulary shifted downward, flat characters, compressing time — and all this is worth noticing; these are all elements of craft that recent posts suggest MFA programs completely skip and/or have total contempt for. These are REALLY OBVIOUS techniques in this story because the story is so short and simple, and that’s why “it “Wild Night” works so well as an illustration of craft.

I’m going to pause here and say that I liked this story, but Lee doesn’t know much about animals, or else he threw away everything he knows about animals in order to write this thriller. And this did bother me a little bit, even though I was watching Lee put the story together and therefore I did not care a lot about the animals acting in unrealistic and frankly unbelievable ways. I do, however, vote for Lee genuinely not knowing much of anything about animals and basically not doing much if any research on any animals, and the reason I think that’s likely is that – you saw that line about dog names up there? That’s about a puppy Jordan’s getting, and

The labradoodle in question belonged to the neighbors down the street. It was a month-old puppy who had not made friends with the cat its owners already had. Three broken lamps and a torn-down curtain later, they started asking if anyone else might be interested in a puppy …

And I am here to tell you that a month-old puppy is barely toddling and may not even be up on its feet at all, hasn’t really got vision sorted out yet and cannot focus well, is just barely weanable if it’s an orphan and you’re desperate to get it eating – I recommend formula and a syringe with a nipple attachment at this age – and basically a month-old puppy is not going to be terrorizing the cat. People do get puppies this young, and what I mean here is ignorant people who have absolutely no clue, and if the puppy survives it will most likely show signs of predictable emotional trauma from being badly handled at such an early age, with the most typical problems that result being separation anxiety and lack of bite inhibition. Possibly it’s just as well Lee put this line into the story in the first couple of pages, as after this, I was prepared for him to get everything about the animals wrong all the way through the story and therefore I didn’t mind (much) when he threw away reality in favor of plot.

Note that if ANYONE in the editorial lineup had known ANYTHING about puppies, they could have fixed that line, though, and that would have been nice.

More important than realism in the story, the puppy does not get killed. Remember, almost no one actually dies in this story. Let’s talk about that.

In chapter ten, the eighty kids and twelve teachers (and no puppies) enter the Skyline Zoo. This is 20% of the way through the story, and let me note that the chapters in this story average 4.7 pages long. This is based on page numbers being enabled (for some reason) in the ebook, so I divided 208 pages by 44 chapters and there we go. These are REALLY short chapters, and I want to point out that first, MG and YA books tend to have shorter chapters than adult fiction; and second, keeping the chapters short is a way of making a story seem faster-paced. The short chapters here didn’t bother me, partly because I was noting the use of short chapters as a technique, but also because the whole story is from Jordan’s pov, so it’s not like the reader is being jerked from one pov to another or anything like that. One point of making the chapters really short is that each chapter break is an opportunity for a minor or major cliffhanger. The author doesn’t need to put cliffhangers at each chapter break, and in fact I don’t suggest the author do that, but cliffhanger lines are natural places for chapter breaks. Therefore, lots of short chapters can increase the tension to the extent they are combined with lots of cliffhanger moments.

So here we are in the Skyline Zoo. A young woman provides a tour, where we see that the habitats have been made to look as much as possible like natural ecosystems. There are lions and tigers and bears, plus wolves and a hippo – let’s not ask how much the water in the hippo’s pool weighs or quibble about design constraints. I’m sure if you REALLY want a hippo plus a giant pool of water on the 97^th floor of a skyscraper, you can make it happen. The important thing is that everything Jordan notices during the introduction to the zoo is going to turn up later in the story. This is a great example of integrating description with plot setup. It’s also a game with the reader, because the reader – who is aware of what’s coming because it’s right there in the book description – is probably going to be making mental notes. Oh, THERE, that might be a good way to escape predators – oh, HERE is a great idea for escaping almost any predator – ah hah, THAT is where Grace is hiding – and all of this is correct, though there are going to be some plot twists that aren’t signaled so clearly. I’d be interested in whether young readers find so much of this so obvious, but I think Lee does a great job with this and I feel he expects readers to pick up a lot of it. There’s no problem with protagonist stupidity here because Jordan, who didn’t read the book description, has no way to guess what’s going to happen, while the reader is quite clear on this. It’s possibly rather rare for the author to so clearly separate what the reader knows and is supposed to know from what the protagonist can possibly know, and as I say, I think this offers an opportunity for the author to be playful with the reader. That’s how it feels to me, even if Lee didn’t think of it that way.

I want to mention a few things that probably aren’t as obvious. One is the tiger with the scarred face. This tiger is named Ajax; he’s one of the few named animals. Why is this tiger given a name and an identifiable mark any fool can recognize at a glance? This isn’t a random detail. Lee is personalizing that tiger because almost no one is going to get killed, remember, but that tiger is going to die. Jordan and her friends recognize him by that scar and call him by name, and so his death acquires pathos that would be impossible for a tiger who is presented as a depersonalized killing machine. They feel bad for his death – caused by Grace, after all, as Ajax was just being a tiger – and so the reader also feels bad about his death. More about that in a minute. But the reader doesn’t have to feel as bad as if kids were getting killed. It’s pathos, but dialed down for MG readers, and I think this was very clever of Lee and I’m sure he did it on purpose, or that the back of his brain knew exactly what this detail would do even if Lee didn’t think about it consciously.

And I’ll add that I have done exactly the same thing, minus the tiger: personalize one character who is going to die in order to give his death pathos and also (often) lead the reader to care about other people who die at the same time because personalizing one character leads the reader to care about the others. It’s a way of saying “This was a real person, so the rest of them are all real people too, so this is sad.” And this is where a lot of so-called action openings go wrong: a story opens with a fight or battle, but none of the characters have been created as people yet and therefore the reader has no reason to care about the death and devastation on the page. The author thinks they’re opening with action, but without at least one personalized character on the page, there’s just noise. It doesn’t take a lot to personalize a character in a story as brief and basically shallow as “Wild Night,” and that’s why just giving a tiger a name and an identifying characteristic does the job – that and having the kids notice and feel sad when the tiger dies.

Back to the story!

So, there we are in the zoo. This young woman is conducting the students on a tour of the zoo, and the finale of the tour is feeding time for the tigers, and this is where things go wrong, as the young woman giving the tour is trapped in the enclosure with the tigers. Here, we see Lee make two interesting decisions. One is not to have Jordan watch the actual death of the woman. Lee is reducing gore here, making this story more MG-appropriate. He’s also helping the readers along with recovering sympathy for a tiger when it dies later, by preventing the readers from seeing the tiger kill the woman. Most important, Lee is establishing the possibility that people can die – friendly, named characters. He’s doing that now because he wants to keep the possibility plausible, which is tricky because he didn’t kill anyone at the amusement park ride in the first chapter, so he needs to show that no, really, characters might die. However, it’s interesting to note that the next thing he does is reduce the number of potential victims – and also, I’m going to reiterate, no one else does die, not even Grace, whom I thought might well be eaten by tigers as a just ending to the story. That doesn’t happen. A lot of animals are going to get killed, but no other people.

Reducing the number of potential victims is helpful in two ways. First, clearing out most of the kids right at the beginning reduces the gore potential. If all eighty kids plus twelve adults had been stuck in that zoo, some would definitely have been killed and we’d have been looking at a sort of Hunger Games situation, with tons of death and blood everywhere we looked. This would have made the novella a very different kind of story and frankly I have a hard time believing a MG imprint would have been keen on something that gory and awful. Aging the story up to YA would make that work. Second, by getting most of the potential victims out of the way, Lee immediately reduces the potential for crowd scenes. The story becomes a lot easier to write because he’s left with only four trapped kids, and not only that, but they’re barely characters at all. We’ve got Jordan, yes; and her friend Paz. We’ve also got two little kids, who are there to give Jordan and Paz someone to protect and be heroic for.  The little kids do fine, they’re little troopers, but their basic function in the story is to act as “pet the puppy” plot devices – protecting them gives Jordan and Paz more of a chance to shine than if the two of them were only protecting themselves. They have basically no personality, and actually Paz doesn’t either. The little kids are fine for their role in the story and don’t need to be more complex. Flattening all the characters once again reduces wordcount and complexity.

And here’s something interesting: there’s an arctic exhibit where there’s a model of a ship trapped in the ice (great detail!) with nets hanging from the mast (working out why nets rather than sails are hanging from the masts is left as an exercise for the reader). I’m sure the reader – on the lookout for ways to get away from killer animals – will have noticed those nets. I sure did. The interesting thing is, when faced with the question of where to go to be safe, the kids think of that immediately. Lee doesn’t have them dither around going Oh no, now what? for more than a few seconds. This reduces wordcount and also reduces reader frustration with character stupidity. That might be useful later, when the reader says, Ah hah, I know exactly where Grace is, and this time Jordan doesn’t figure it out. She is distracted, so the reader may not feel she’s being especially dense, but more important, she’s done quite a few clever things already by that time, so that also helps her not seem dense when she fails to figure out this detail. But! In order to help with all this, Lee has it on the tip of her tongue. She realizes she’s missing something. What is she missing? Whoops, tigers, no time to think about it now! And this is helpful for making it reasonable for Jordan to miss things even though the reader may well be nodding and pointing and saying, “There’s Grace, there she is!” And a lot of this is set up by having Jordan think fast multiple times before she first misses something important, and this with the nets is one of those times.

So Lee is doing a LOT with craft — flattening the characters, reducing the number of characters, personalizing the tiger, using the setting to set up practically everything he’ll want later (not quite, but nearly), giving Jordan lots of chances to be smart so when she’s dense later, it doesn’t make the reader think she’s an idiot. Especially because, as I say, tigers.

And then things happen, and more things happen, and I guess I could lay it all out because I sure haven’t reserved much, but I’ll condense it and just say that yes, EVERYTHING Jordan noticed during the introduction to the zoo winds up being important. And nobody dies, even though Lee dials up the tension by, for example, saying, at the beginning of chapter 33:

They wasted five seconds just panicking. Crouched there, in front of the window, not even turning the screws. Not doing anything at all.

Five seconds.

Later on, looking back at it, Jordan would remember those five seconds, given how things turned out. Those seconds would have made all the difference.

Look at that! Lee thinks that the reader may be deciding that everyone is safe because no one has died except that one young woman right at the beginning. I think he thought, Let’s dial it up, let’s make the reader really worry! Those lines made me worry, and I already strongly suspected no one else was going to die, that he was aiming for a rather gentle thriller. You want to know what those seconds made a difference for? The tiger. Ajax the tiger wouldn’t have died if the kids had been just a few seconds faster getting out that window. But the kids are all fine, though their troubles are by no means over even when they do get through that window. Which is 97 floors up, remember, so that’s fun.

Look at how Lee steps back to a distant third so he can say, Looking back on it, Jordan would remember those five seconds. He’s increasing AND decreasing tension. He’s as good as saying someone’s going to die, but not Jordan. This is right at the beginning of a chapter; he might just as well have put those lines right at the ending of the previous chapter. I probably would have, if I included those lines at all. That is a heck of a cliffhanger. Nobody’s going to quit reading right there. Why did Lee put those lines at the beginning of a chapter instead of the end? Maybe to reduce tension a little bit because he wants to pull tension up, but not too high? Not sure.

Overall, this is a short, tightly plotted MG thriller, high on excitement, with a fun setting. Lee does an impressive job integrating the setting with the plot setup. He does a good job moving the story forward with very little time spent on characterization. He could have picked up this exact same story, added a ton more characterization, tripled the length, and created an adult thriller. This is the only story he’s aimed at young readers, and now I almost want to go back and read some of his adult thrillers and think about how he handles characterization in those. I think characterization is often rather flat for Lee; I think he’s exactly the sort of writer people are thinking of when they draw a (false) dichotomy between characterization and plot. There’s no such dichotomy, broadly speaking, but this is the sort of story in which that dichotomy does occur.

Weaknesses: as long as you don’t consider the flat characters a flaw – I don’t; I think they worked fine for this story – the only real weakness is implausibility. Some of this has to do with the behavior of the animals. I sort of think most people probably know that wolves don’t generally attack humans for no reason. The situation here is going to make all the animals upset and excited, so … wolves still wouldn’t be at all likely to attack people, but maybe it doesn’t seem as unlikely. There are some worse plausibility problems. It’s honestly not at all likely that all the animals will be as keen to attack each other as shown in this story. Predators are not keen on gladiatorial combat because it’s nuts to engage in gladiatorial combat. It is, most particularly, absolutely insane for wolves to tangle with bears. They wouldn’t do that unless they had no choice. They had plenty of choice here. So did the lions, and lions aren’t that stupid either. None of these animals are starving. They’re well-fed zoo animals. It makes no sense for them to attack each other and battle to the death for no reason whatsoever when there is plenty of room to retreat.

Also, after eating a big meal, almost any predator would curl up somewhere and take a nap. Predators, as a rule, gorge themselves silly given a chance and then sleep for hours. They don’t dash around athletically after stuffing themselves any more than people go out to run the 100 yard dash after Thanksgiving dinner. Therefore, every time some gazelle gets killed, that takes both the gazelle and the predators out of the way. Lee puts the lions (and wolves, and tigers) in too many scenes. It’s stupid to have the lions eat a bear and then turn up again half an hour later stalking a person. They would be asleep. (This isn’t the only problem with the lions; see below.)

Also, when you abruptly open a lot of cages all at once, you’re going to discover that most animals are pretty hesitant to leave the familiar enclosure, so you’re going to have a significant amount of time, a lot longer than a few seconds, before mayhem ensues.

It was very unlikely the tigers would respond quickly to the sound of a random tiger’s cub’s cries. Maternal care in tigers is controlled by oxytocin and progesterone and so forth, just like it is for everybody else, and without those hormones sloshing around, you’re not likely to see any maternal behavior at all, certainly not in defense of some other tiger’s cubs. Tigers are not social animals. Lee made up this detail out of whole cloth. Plus, even if tigers usually did respond to random cubs crying, in this really unusual and upsetting situation, the tigers wouldn’t be responding to normal social cues anyway. Beats me how else Lee could have gotten the tigers to attack so ferociously at that point in the story, but that was highly implausible and one of many details that shows that plot ruled this story, with the author forcing implausible events to drive the plot. Making implausible events seem plausible requires a quick pace and some agile handwaving, both of which are on full display in this story.

Overall, using the tigers as one of the big threats was a good idea. Tigers will definitely, for sure,  attack and kill you just because the opportunity is there, whether they are hungry or not. I don’t mean all tigers all the time, but I do mean you should always assume that any tiger you ever encounter is probably musing about the possibility, because that’s how tigers are. Ditto for polar bears, another good choice.

One unforced error is that when Lee had a polar bear hit a lioness full-force, obviously breaking her ribs, that lioness appeared uninjured later. I’m almost sure I didn’t miscount the lions, so I’m pretty sure about this. Same deal: a badly injured wolf wasn’t showing any signs of injury the next time it appeared. Oops. An editor should have caught this.

I don’t believe that a kid would actually dislocate an arm that way. It’s not that easy to dislocate a joint, and if you do it slowly, the way it happens here, then the kid would let go before the joint was dislocated. I found this the single least believable detail in a story filled to the brim with implausible details. So, overall, plausibility is an issue if you are counting lions and wolves, if you know anything about probable animal behavior, and if you expect people to let go before letting a joint be dislocated. However, the story was really fun even for me, even though I was aware of the plausibility issues all the way through.

I can’t resist thinking about what you should do if you ever find yourself trapped in a zoo with all the lions, tigers, bears, wolves, hippos, and other wild animals let loose and no doors anywhere strong enough to keep out a bear. Well, what I would do is find any office or other room with any door that closes, shut the door, and stay quiet. The fact that a bear could break through the door doesn’t mean a bear will break through the door. The bear is going to have plenty of other things to do that don’t require breaking through a door. It would not be able to tell you were in the room. Bears have a great sense of smell, but you’re a human, like the ten thousand other humans who walked through the zoo that day. Everything smells like humans and also like all the other animals. You know what smells like food? The kitchen in the zoo, where the keepers prepare the many, many foods for all the animals. Don’t hide there.

No offices or other rooms with doors? Climb into any tree. Yes, lots of predators can climb. Lots can’t, and of the ones that can, lots will have better things to do. No trees? There are a lot of exhibits, many now empty, and all are rather awkward to get into and out of because that’s kind of the point. Get into any empty exhibit and stay quiet. Even if the interior door is open and can’t be closed, it’s not that likely any predator will come looking for you. There are lots of other things to do and your scent would not draw a predator because, see above, human scent is everywhere and there are great heaping gobs of other distractions all over the place. I bet you’d be fine in the morning.

But this is still a fun story, and also interesting in terms of how Lee put it together. It’s a lot easier to see the moving parts in a story this simple, a story aimed at younger readers. This is the kind of story that could be easily read in a day or so and then taken apart in a class about how to write novels. This is what I think should be offered in classes or workshops aimed at teaching people to write novels, instead of whatever the heck they do in MFA classes besides sneer at craft.