We’re born with a finite number of opportunities. Attrition, bad choices, misspent goodwill, and fucked-up luck. The opportunities dwindle through a process called living. Our portfolio of prospects turns into a tattered novel of outcomes. I am twenty-two. Thus opens Where Night Stops, the latest book from American writer Douglas Light, whose story collection, Girls of Trouble, won the 2010 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. (Also, his debut, East Fifth Bliss, was turned into the film Trouble with Bliss, which starred Michael C. Hall, Brie Larson, and Peter Fonda.) Filled with tense and intriguing situations, plenty of poignant and philosophical sentiments, and an assortment of colorful—if also slightly underdeveloped—characters, the novel is a captivating psychological drama whose relentless vibrancy and pace mostly makes up for its marginally opaque and repetitious core. The tale revolves around a nameless young man whose childhood trauma (a car crash) leaves him orphaned and steers him towards destitute and aimless adulthood. That is, until (as the official synopsis reads) “Ray-Ray, an Iranian with a shadowy past . . . initiates him into a new life.” Specifically, he starts “fend[ing] for himself through carrying out clandestine drops for cash from an anonymous source”; while that’s continue...