Elegies for an Age of Disenchantment: A Review of Joel Hans’s The Bedtime Emptying of Our World

From lush forests to faraway kingdoms, fairy tales have long taken place in realms where enchantment is native to the landscape. Contemporary fiction, however, often treats enchantment more cautiously, filtering the magical through irony, ambiguity, or psychological realism rather than asking readers to suspend disbelief even temporarily. In his debut story collection The Bedtime Emptying of Our World, Joel Hans inherits much of the old fairy tale infrastructure—sacrificial bargains, feudal monarchies, animal intermediaries, metamorphoses—but transplants it into postpastoral terrains like unstable coastlines, mineralized wastelands, and flooded homesteads, all under the same multi-lunar sky. The strange does not descend upon an otherwise recognizable world, but is the foundation of reality itself.

Across this collection of 22 stories, pain, love, and longing are spatialized, embedded in uncanny geographies and systems that characters learn to negotiate through acts of capitulation and resistance. Considering these altered environments, it struck me just how frequently Hans’s settings behave like mirrors or extensions of the mind—reminiscent of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, physical sites where emotional and ethical conflicts take form. What initially appears whimsical reveals itself, story by story, as a system of belief that characters cling to with the same reverence we reserve for religion and empirical science, whether that means engineering rain in a sealed desert or tracking a loved one’s petrification through an invented taxonomy of minerals. Each story introduces a contained dimension with established rules, then explores what happens when those rules encounter human attachment.

“A Man, His Oblations” is a real doozy of an introduction to this idea. In it, a grieving father named Ford throws objects into a gulf known for its miracles. We learn that anything offered to this gulf is reforged in an underwater chrysalis and eventually returned to shore in ‘improved’ form—a sketch becomes an oil painting, a child’s rocking horse emerges as a living equine. But the terms of improvement remain opaque. However visceral the birthing imagery gets, the gulf operates on a temporality that defies human expectation; its delays and distortions unsettle any straightforward notion of cause and effect. Ford’s indulgence in rituals after losing his wife and son to the water is a painfully familiar coping mechanism. Yet we are reminded over and over that the gulf never restores what was lost. It produces something else, something adjacent, and in doing so reaffirms its indifference to human desire.

It saddened me, witnessing that dreadful tension between belief and reality. Ford’s persistent rejection of the fixed boundary between life and death keeps hope alive while cocooning him within a structure that may never yield what he seeks, simply because to make a living creature better is an impossible ask. “The inanimate can be improved with a heartbeat,” Hans writes, “but once there is the bud of a brain, a lattice on which to hang the emotion of love, there is already perfection, and by then, it’s far too late.” What the gulf offers, I realized, is a disciplined means of continuing to dwell inside grief.

Loss and bereavement are everywhere in this collection. “Two Decorated Skulls in the Miramonte Swamp” follows a girl dealing with the deaths of her two older sisters while hurricanes transform her family’s desert home into a swamp. Nothing fully disappears, but nothing is preserved with perfect fidelity either. As houses rot and saguaros collapse around her, the narrator layers her sisters’ skulls with their old earrings, rings, stickers and wreaths. In “Cardinine, Seafoamyst, Morningite,” a parent watches their son gradually turn to stone, using the cold language of geology to describe the whole haunting process. To memorialize, these stories seem to posit, is to participate in transformation.

That same logic of unstable preservation crystallizes through the book’s recurring focus on guardians and their wards, as Hans repeatedly situates these relationships within systems that complicate care. In the titular story, a bedtime routine swells into a cosmological act of stewardship as parents hasten to satisfy their daughter’s every whim before she sleeps. In “The Cirrus Circus,” a grandfather and granddaughter try to manufacture weather together, as if enough coordinated effort might assuage maternal absence. In “Sapling by Shingle by Soot,” children eventually become the keepers of parents who can no longer navigate the ruined world on their own. Across these shifting roles, care becomes another form of adaptation to what has already changed beyond repair. I thought the final line of “Once, the Sound Dad and I Loved Most” beautifully captures a revelation so many experience at some point in their lives: “I reached up to rest my hand on Dad’s shoulder, but instead found him below me, his lips still stained with cardinal, straining up to grasp me once more before I grew away.” It’s that moment you realize the person who once anchored your world is now the one trying to keep up with it. That moment you realize it’s time to let go.

My favorite story in the collection is “Thirty-One Functions for a Girl Living Inside an Apple.” Here, the governing system is the narrative’s morphology itself. The story is explicitly in conversation with folklorist Vladimir Propp’s 31 basic structural elements (or “functions”) of a typical Russian fairy tale, moving through a predetermined sequence while continually exposing the limitations of that framework. A girl grows up inside an apple and, after surviving her stepmother’s assassination attempt, undertakes a journey across the land to find herself. Her confinement inside the apple is a literalized expression of the constraints imposed on her identity. The kingdoms, the exchanges, and the figures of authority that dictate her life all belong to a world that sustains itself through repetition. Her resistance lies in her ability to perceive this structure with clear eyes, to register the patterns and expectations people have of her without fully submitting to it.

It’s easy for a story’s conceptual framework to overshadow its emotional immediacy, making it harder to respond to individual characters. While reading this collection, I sometimes felt as if held at a remove from the unfurling plots; yet they still managed to cut through that distance, much like how the girl’s insulating apple is pierced after her stepmother drives a dagger into its core. The stories may draw from the structures of folklore and fairy tales, but they’re far less interested in nostalgia than in testing what those narrative systems can still hold. Buoyed by Hans’s precise and imagistic prose, the separation between feeling and form keeps these stories from resolving too neatly into sentiment.

If you’re looking to be transported to worlds where setting is more than scenery and narrative logic feels like a living force, The Bedtime Emptying of Our World delivers with confidence. Hans attends to how people acclimate to conditions that don’t care about them, and even more to what that acclimation costs.

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A Conversation with Joel Hans

Joel Hans is the author of the collection THE BEDTIME EMPTYING OF OUR WORLD, winner of the 2025 Moon City Short Fiction Award. His fiction appears in Story, Fairy Tale Review, West Branch, The Journal, Booth, and others, and has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona, and now edits Astrolabe, a literary journal in the form of a dynamic universe. Find him in Tucson, Arizona, where he lives with his family, or at joelhans.com.

Fiction Editor Jaime Goh and Joel Hans conversed via email to discuss the craft and inspiration behind the stories included in The Bedtime Emptying of Our World (Moon City Press, February 2026).

STORY

The Bedtime Emptying of Our World reads like a collection of modern fables or myth fragments. “Thirty-One Functions for a Girl Living Inside an Apple” uses the rigid Proppian architecture of the fairy tale, but the emotional life within it feels much more unruly and contemporary. What did that formal constraint open up for you? How do you balance the mythic scale of your worlds with the mundane specificity of human relationships?

JOEL HANS

The constraint of “Thirty-One Functions” was mostly a delight. I don’t work under constraint often (certainly not often enough), but in that story I found it particularly helpful in the idea of passage between spaces and times and states of someone’s life where there is suddenly very little consistency. I’ve always been more vignette-y than expository in my stories—read a handful of them and you’ll agree—but the constraint pushed me to cut scenes in unexpected places so that I could fit the story into the mold I’d chosen for it.

There are a handful of subsequent beats in the Proppian architecture where the villain attempts reconnaissance, receives information, deceives the hero, benefits from their complicity, and ultimately harms the hero or their family. Without Propp’s architecture guiding how I constructed the story, I might’ve wrapped all these beats into one long and highly dramatic scene, but instead I “had to” cut from the action, force the reader into whitespace, and then re-enter somewhere familiar but also new. That action let me play with how I characterized both the hero—the girl—and the villain—the stepmother—so that they’re almost in conversation with one another, responding to the architecture of the story and ultimately resisting the titles/archetypes they have been given. That was where I could escape the standard-issue flat fairy-tale characters and drive toward something that was deeply human.

I once had a fiction teacher who liked to argue in workshops that scene breaks were cop-outs for the truly hard work of writing your way through high tension or emotion. While I have found that to be true in some cases, and it’s something I’m always experimenting with in new stories, I’ve also found that deliberate breaks are also an art unto themselves: How can you make the absences—the literal whitespace on the page—speak loudest? How can a scene break be not just a convenience, but a moment of reflection on the characters?

STORY

Your stories often begin with outlandish premises that quickly establish their own internal authority. It was delightful to experience this journey with “Thirty-One Functions for a Girl Living Inside an Apple” and “The Cirrus Circus.” How do you build this sense of narrative trust so a reader accepts the absurd on its own terms?

JOEL HANS

I’ve had a particular essay—“Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale” by Kate Bernheimer—stuck in my head for a decade now. In this essay, Kate explores how a few classic fairy-tale elements—flatness, abstraction, intuitive logic, and normalized magic—give these stories a unique permission to express absurdity with authority. Of these elements Kate describes, I enjoy playing most with intuitive logic (“The language of traditional fairy tales tells us that first this happened, and then that happened. There is never an explanation of why.”) and normalized magic (“The day to day is collapsed with the wondrous.”).

I try, with every story I write, to explore how far I can push that permission. In both those stories, for example, it’s paramount to me that I never explain why the girl starts out her life inside an apple or why this little girl is held responsible for creating weather. They are simply matters of the story. If I even attempt to give you a portal through which you can understand worldbuilding or the systems of magic, then I fear they start to fall apart. It’s not the right mode for everyone, but it’s the one way I’ve found I can push that permission and have a hell of a lot of fun at the same time.

STORY

Objects possess enormous emotional charge in this collection: toys, bones, rocks, crayons, tapes. What makes objects such potent vessels for memory and feeling?

JOEL HANS

I’ve always been a deeply anthropomorphic person. The things around me carry such an emotional heft. I feel as though part of myself has been given away to them, or maybe it’s the other way around, which means I have trouble getting rid of things I’ve held onto for a long time simply because I’ve held onto them for a long time.

Many of the characters I write feel the same way. Some of the objects in their possession are magical in the fairy-tale sense, and so they must be held onto until the exact right moment their magic can be deployed to get the character out of a mess or reach a state of epiphany that brings them into the next phase of their story. The rest are magical in that sense of a shared “giving away.”

A lot of my characters also operate in isolation. Sometimes they’re truly alone, but much of the time, they are emotionally isolated, as the father in “Cardinine, Seafoamyst, Morningite” who can’t freely express himself around his son, who’s undergoing such a cruel transformation. For those characters—and for the act of writing fiction—objects become very convenient ways for them to emote in neutral, let’s say, territory.

STORY

I noted the recurrence of desert environments and how moonlight is referred to as moonslight in several stories, even before “Once, Three Brothers Guided Two Moons Across the Sky” speaks of multiple moons. All of your settings are vividly rendered yet slightly estranged from recognizable geography. Did you imagine a continuous world behind these stories, or does each inhabit its own mythic ecosystem?

JOEL HANS

I’m so happy you caught on to that. These details don’t matter so much for how anyone reads the collection, but if you’ll indulge me for a moment: Years ago, as I was trying to wrangle these stories into the shape of a collection, I was also working on a novel that, in my head, took place in the same world as “The Cirrus Circus,” only some hundreds of years later. I found a real energy in articulating the throughline, even if it was only for me—so much that I wondered: Could this whole collection, even stories I’d written ten years ago, also fit into this same world, too?

So, yes—there is a continuous world, a distant planet that humans have terraformed into the design of the Sonoran Desert, as that, in my estimation, would be the easiest to establish in a new and harsh and transforming ecosystem. The mythic quality comes from a few geographical and “magical” rules I’d established, and the estrangement from the fact that in my mind, these stories take place over a few hundred years of this world’s development. But, I had the interesting challenge of making the experience of exploring this world through odds and ends somewhat consistent—it was enormously fun to plumb back into stories I’d written years ago to hone the details, like whether or not the moons had yet collided. I’m sure there are places where I’ve misstepped, but a little extra estrangement is a good thing, in my opinion.

STORY

The stories repeatedly feature encounters between the human and the more-than-human, outside a purely symbolic register. How do you approach writing animals, weather, and landscapes as agents rather than as props and backdrops?

JOEL HANS

Agents is a very clever word here. While some animals in this collection are full-on characters—“Little Monsters of the Far Wood” being the richest example, featuring a Gila monster with uplifted intelligence—many function more as agents than characters. They operate like helpers in a fairy tale, whose sole purpose is to waltz in (with full autonomy and a distinct agenda), enact change, and conveniently disappear. Same goes for weather or landscapes or any other object. In fairy tales, the “East Wind” and the “West Wind” can be different agents with different agendas. A star can give you just the right gift at just the right time just as easily as it can misdirect you. The moon might hold the answer you’ve been waiting for, or it might try to swallow you whole.

I approach writing these things with the same level of agency and potential for upheaval. My characters need more than set dressing to react to, and since they’re so often in some kind of isolation, these agents give me different modes to glide the narrative forward. And they’re just fun.

STORY

I appreciate how transformation in your work never feels wholly wondrous. It’s beautiful, but it’s also frightening and isolating. I felt that especially in “Cardinine, Seafoamyst, Morningite,” where the boy’s gradual mineralization is described with such awe and tenderness, even as it becomes an ongoing form of loss for the parent who loves him. What compels you about metamorphosis as a theme and narrative engine?

JOEL HANS

It’s funny, because I was thinking about metamorphosis as being the theme and narrative engine of the next collection I’ve started dreaming up! I suppose these themes have a way of emerging in more ways than even I can track or acknowledge, even as I write them.

I’ve long been resistant to the prohibition placed on writers that their characters must change during the narrative. That the only way to perform characterization is to show a distinct before and after. I find that actual people are far more solidified—we don’t change often, and when we do, it’s over periods we don’t often express in short stories, much less novels. I much prefer writing characters who are emotionally and logically consistent, but then I explore how they react, with relative consistency, to new scenery or transformations. In aggregate, I’d like to believe that helps you get a pretty good sense of who these people are and what keeps them going despite everything I put them through.

STORY

In “A Man, His Oblations,” the gulf’s eerie, idiosyncratic logic of sacrifice and return drives the narrative. I’m curious as to where that concept came from. Were you consciously drawing on folkloric traditions of offerings and bargains with nature? Or did that cosmology grow organically out of the story’s emotional core?

JOEL HANS

I wish I could remember the exact lineage of the concept. I wrote that story quite a few seasons of my life ago.

I do remember asking myself: If you could make one thing better, what would that be? Why would it not be something you already love so deeply, like your own child? You wish the best for them, but why not wish one step better?

I also remember early versions of the imagery I wanted to play with. The rocking horse, the nondescript shack near the gulf, the glass marbles on the beach, a key that could open nothing or anything. The headland with its cliff and, underwater just beneath, the graveyard of oblations waiting to be renewed.

This story is the oldest in the collection but that made it the right candidate to go first: It was the first story in which I felt like I found my resonance, as a writer, between my tendency toward idiosyncratic/fabulist/fairy-tale conceits and my desire for that emotional core.

STORY

Several stories revolve around routines that characters follow with religious intensity, even when the outcome is unpredictable. Patterned acts of waiting, counting, and appealing persist throughout the collection. What keeps bringing you back to ritual as a response to grief and fear?

JOEL HANS

The shallowest answer is that ritual is a convenient mechanism for a story because it gives me permission to lean into vignettes and show how a character responds to even the slightest change in scenery.

The more personal answer is that ritual is one of my defenses against dread. That ritual being writing itself—not just stories, but also in a journal, both of which I’ve been doing (nearly) every day for many years. Dread has been knocking around in my head for a long time, and it’s something I’ve struggled with quite a bit, but recently I’ve been trying to reframe it—not as fear over what might come combined with my inability to stop it, but maybe a keenness toward the possibility of change. Maybe I shouldn’t dread my dread, if you will, but listen to its ebbs and flows, the texture of its intensities. Maybe I should turn that into anticipation. Ritual can be a way to examine both.

To bring the conversation back to these stories—the father protagonist in “Mouth, Wormhole, Window” rearranges his life in response to dread over the mysterious “hole that stir[s] at the back of the woods,” whereas the father protagonist in “A Man, His Oblations” keeps throwing items into the gulf in hopes he’ll find a way to feel anticipation again. The teenage lead of “Two Decorated Skulls in the Miramonte Swamp” keeps trying to put the bones of her sisters together because she anticipates the possibility that while it hasn’t worked the first hundred times, it just might on the hundred and first. Other characters modulate this spectrum of feeling in other ways—ways I’ve been grateful to think about much more deeply in (trying) to answer this question.

Perhaps the most personal answer is that this is unresolved territory for me and has been for a while. Probably will be for a while longer yet.

STORY

I found myself moved by the impossible acts of love parents attempt in these stories. They try to perfect their children, protect them from danger, or provide them with more than reality can hold. Did writing those characters ever change the way you understood the limits of parental devotion?

JOEL HANS

This is a hard question.

Some of these characters express aspects of devotion that I’d consider deeply problematic. Selfish in nature. Obsessive. Misguided. If there’s anything that’s changed in writing these characters, it’s in an attempt to understand those limits. You can try to help your children become the best possible version of who they are, but you can’t remake them. You can’t ask them to be born again.

Others I would aspire to. I know I’m present for the day-to-day parts of parenthood, but I do wonder how I would show up in the face of anything that deeply upsets our sense of normal. We were just talking about dread—parenthood can be a plentiful source of that, too, and maybe in writing these characters, I’ve also tried to plot some of the possibilities of watching that dread come true, reacting to it, exploring it, and doing my best to burrow out from underneath it.

I’d like to believe I’d become some amalgamation of the most reasonable qualities of these folks.

STORY

One echo I loved was the way family suffering kept changing scope across the collection. In “The Aunt of Everything,” a mother’s affliction no longer belongs only to the family. It becomes a public spectacle that others want to interpret, manage, and instrumentalize, which to me read as a striking reversal of the more intimate, sealed-off grief in some of the earlier stories. When you were putting this collection together, what kinds of echoes or reversals were you hoping readers would notice as they moved from one story to the next?

JOEL HANS

That’s such a great read of the story. I do love worldbuilding, but also then viewing that world as through a telescope: You can see rich details at your point of focus, but everything just beyond remains blurred at best.

We’ve already covered a lot of echoes, so reversals have got me thinking, even if I look at just stories I’ve put back-to-back; take these five:

1. The supposed flatness of protagonists between stories like “Thirty-One Functions for a Girl Living Inside an Apple” and “The Cirrus Circus”
2. The balance of story length and story scope between “Upon Return from the Land Where One Never Dies” and “Two Decorated Skulls in the Miramonte Swamp”
3. The specificity of voice and characterization between “The Aunt of Everything” and “Once There Was an Upside-Down Daughter”
4. The “all-too-human dilemma of parenting and being parented,” as Eric Schlich so perfectly pointed out in his blurb, between “When Stars Are Just Stars” and “The Halfchosen Child”
5. The varied intellect of animals (and whether we can perceive them, and how) between this quintet: “A Protest of Tortoise,” “The Times I’ll Trade Time with the Crows,” “The Coup of Animal New,” “Once, You Were Asked to Count the Hummingbird,” and “Little Monsters of the Far Wood”

I could go on. What some might think of as unevenness or chaos in a collection, I think of as refractions (or reversals) of the same concepts.

STORY

Many of your works explore the possibility that what is lost might come back, whether through literal return, transmutation, memory, or narrative afterlife. Do you think these stories ultimately lean toward consolation and hope, or are they more about learning to live with uncertainty?

JOEL HANS

As an aside, I absolutely adore this concept of narrative afterlife—I’ve never thought about it exactly in that way. But it’s an instinct I’ve followed in certain characters, like the servant and king in “Thirty-One Functions,” in that I love the idea of “rescuing” a minor character from a marginal place, giving them a broader space to express themselves, and then also forcing them to acknowledge that their world’s wider narrative can and will go on beyond them. Maybe that’s something new to explore in the next collection!

But to answer the question: I’d like to believe there is hope to be found in these stories. The words you used do a lovely job of describing the stories I very intentionally used to bookend this collection. “A Man, His Oblations” deals with the hope of literal return and transmutation, while “The Halfchosen Child” is all about an exploration of memory and narrative. So yes, there is plenty of uncertainty in the world of this collection—as there is in our own lives—and so the best I can do is showcase many possible ways of reconciling with that uncertainty, whether through talismans or magic or technology we might never truly know, as a way to show that hope is always possible.

STORY

Reading this collection, I kept wondering what kinds of stories first tuned your imagination to this frequency—where the world feels enchanted, threatening, filled with obscure rules, and always on the verge of changing shape. Which books, songs, or films have had the deepest influence on your writing?

JOEL HANS

I love a list, so let’s make a list.

To begin, Max Lüthi’s “The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man” transformed every conception I had of the depths of fairy tales and the bounds in which playing with them is possible. These stories are littered with my attempts and paying homage to this ancient and continuous form of storytelling and its modes, like blunted motifs, abstract beauty and “beauty shock,” anything golden, closed constructs, extremes, lacks, tiny flaws, repetition, heroes who do not want to be heroes, impossible tasks… I could go on.

But a text of literary criticism can’t replace time spent with fairy tales. When I was helping edit Fairy Tale Review, I had the opportunity to read thousands of contemporary fairy tales, which allowed me to deeply explore the genre and have the privilege of publishing a few that have stuck with me in particular:

From the Mauve Issue:

• Sequoia Nagamatsu, “The Peach Boy”
• Helen Phillips, “One of Us Will Be Happy, It’s Just a Matter of Which One”
• Elise Winn, “Brother and Sister”

The Ochre Issue:

• Courtney Bird, “The Diamond Girl”
• Zachary Doss, “The Season of Daughters”
• Jasmine Sawers, “Delicate”
• Ira Sukrungruang, “Family: A Fairy Tale”

The Translucent Issue:

• Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, “Juniper”
• Kelly Dulaney, “A New Way to Break a Body”
• Rachel Zavecz, “#Belial”

And, finally, the Charcoal Issue:

• Gillian Cummings, “Girl Inside a Raindrop”
• Emrys Donaldson, “The Albatrosses”
• Ann Glaviano, “Teuthida”
• Eric Schlich, “Unpresidented!”
• C Pam Zhang, “Shelter”

I hope maybe you’ll look for these writers’ collections or pick up one of these copies from Wayne State University Press.

There are also plenty of “classic” fairy tales that I would recommend a hundred and one times over, and if you’re crafty, you might find some of the ways in which I’ve carried over their conceits to some of my stories:

• From Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales: “The Land Where One Never Dies,” “Silent for Seven Years,” “The Queen of the Three Mountains of Gold,” “Buffalo Head,” “Misfortune,” “The Sorceress’s Head,” “Apple Girl,” and “Serpent King”
• From Arab Folktales, translated & edited by Inea Bushnaq: “The Girl Who Spoke Jasmines and Lilies,” “The Boy Magician,” “The Bird of the Golden Feather,” “The Nightingale that Shrieked,” and “How the Fox Got Back His Tail”
• From American Indian Myths and Legends, eds. Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz: “Origin of the Gnawing Beaver,” “Stone Boy,” “When Grizzlies Walked Upright,” “Great Medicine Makes a Beautiful Country,” “The Voice, the Flood, and the Turtle,” “A Gust of Wind,” and “Grandmother Spider Steals the Sun”
• From Chinese Fairy Tales & Fantasies, trans. & ed. Moss Roberts: “The Deer in the Dream,” “Sung Ting-po Catches a Ghost,” “Man or Beast,” and “A Dead Son”
• And finally, a few Grimm classics from Maria Tartar’s The Grimm Reader: “Little Brother and Little Sister,” “The Fisherman and His Wife,” “Fitcher’s Bird,” “The Goose Girl,” “A Fairy Tale about a Boy Who Left Home to Learn About Fear,” “The Star Thalers,” “The Golden Key,” and, last but certainly not least, “The Rose”

I hope, if you’re intrigued, this list provides you with a long and beautiful time in a fairyland of your own making.

STORY

Thank you so much for this conversation. Spending time with The Bedtime Emptying of Our World left me feeling that its strangeness is inseparable from its pathos; again and again, these stories find forms capacious enough to hold sorrow, love, dread, and mystery all at once. It was a pleasure to hear about the imagination and care that went into crafting them, and I’m grateful for your generosity in sharing that process.

JOEL HANS

Thank you. I never in my wildest dreams thought someone would read my work with this level of care and rigor. It’s been an incredible joy to sit with these questions and do my very best to do them justice.