**
The Night People are two couples looking to inject some excitement into their mundane lives who begin playing practical jokes on themselves and the police in the dead of night. Finney’s intriguing premise degenerates quickly into a revenge match between the couples and an exceptionally stupid and violent cop, a yokel from Oklahoma. This rather short novel reads like a reject from the sixties/early seventies, when its radical, cop-hating attitude might have stirred sympathy from like-minded hippies. Likewise, Finney’s characters and dialogue seem ripped from one of the author’s own essays into nostalgia, harking back to a time well before any of them were born; plunked down in 1977, they come off not as sophisticated, but rather as silly, stilted, and thoroughly unbelievable.
"...Night People may offer some vicarious Thousand-Clownsy pleasure to three-piece-suiters who dream of breaking out, climbing bridges, and bopping cops." - Kirkus Reviews, Oct. 14th, 1977
The Night People are two couples looking to inject some excitement into their mundane lives who begin playing practical jokes on themselves and the police in the dead of night. Finney’s intriguing premise degenerates quickly into a revenge match between the couples and an exceptionally stupid and violent cop, a yokel from Oklahoma. This rather short novel reads like a reject from the sixties/early seventies, when its radical, cop-hating attitude might have stirred sympathy from like-minded hippies. Likewise, Finney’s characters and dialogue seem ripped from one of the author’s own essays into nostalgia, harking back to a time well before any of them were born; plunked down in 1977, they come off not as sophisticated, but rather as silly, stilted, and thoroughly unbelievable.
"...Night People may offer some vicarious Thousand-Clownsy pleasure to three-piece-suiters who dream of breaking out, climbing bridges, and bopping cops." - Kirkus Reviews, Oct. 14th, 1977