Baby In The Night by Kevin Sampsell

FORTHCOMING — Publishes March 17, 2026.
Now available for pre-order!

One of the Northwest’s best writers.
— Willy Vlautin, author of Northline and The Motel Life

Tony isn't afraid of the dark. In fact, he’s drawn to the nighttime because he believes that the glowing moon is his father. Baby In the Night is a quietly moving novel that follows our narrator, Tony Volcano Ventura, through his childhood as he grows from a very curious baby into a street-smart toddler and preschooler. Living in a poor neighborhood with his loving mother, Tony grapples with the mystery of who his father is, where he might be, and what happened to him. Over the course of many surreal and secret nighttime forays, Tony eventually finds his way to the truth. Along the way, he befriends a teenage junkie and encounters various neighborhood characters: imposter moons, a giant dog, and a droopy-faced messenger. There’s also a mysterious fax machine found in an alleyway—the same alley that Tony thinks might be a hideout full of face-eating pigs. Told from Tony’s unusual point of view, Baby In the Night is a novel full of innocence, tragedy, and a melancholy shot through with magic and wonder.

Advance praise for Baby In The Night

In the exquisite Baby In the Night, Kevin Sampsell writes a coming-of-age story that isn’t set in the typical adolescent pivot into adulthood but in early childhood when the world and human behavior have a sort of sci-fi oddness, beauty, and menace. A coming-of-being story. Our young hero Tony is on a quest to find out about his father. He watches and imbibes sensations, attentively noting the words and actions around him; permeable and inquisitive, finding the edges of things and people. There’s a central mystery, a loss, like there always is in any life, and the answer will set the stage for the life to come. It’s the most engrossing, tender, and quietly strange book I’ve read in ages. — Nate Lippens, author of Ripcord and My Dead Book

In Sampsell's characteristically strange, raw, and tender style, we experience the world through the eyes-wide-open observations of the wondrous Tony Volcano—tiny baby, prodigy of the streets, human relationships, and the moon. It's really fucking good. — Charlie Stephens, author of A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest

The most compelling part of Sampsell’s book, which is written from the perspective of a street smart baby, is how it conveys the inarticulate instinct. Or how a thought or feeling can be perfectly clear on the inside, but emerge all scattered and snarled. Baby in the Night is a fairytale born out of abject poverty. With skewed and comic tenderness, Sampsell teaches readers how to play my new favorite game: WOMB ESCAPE. — Ash Yang-Thompson, author of Still Worm

Baby in the Night is surreal, tender and magnetic. Sampsell renders the slow-drip arrival of language in our baby-protagonist’s mind with revelatory precision. No book better communicates how the language we use shapes the world we live in, and how we feel and see. — Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot

Baby in the Night is deliciously strange and delightfully surreal. Sampsell has once again written a book that will forever live in my head and my heart. — Carla Crujido, author of The Strange Beautiful

Wowsers! Kevin Sampsell has written something so special with Baby in the Night. Tony Volcano, our toddler narrator, spoke directly to the child in me. He offered me his hand and led me through streets filled with violence and compassion. Tony Volcano is proof that sometimes the wisest person in the room might be the two-year-old. This book is surreal, funny, astute, biting, and always deeply moving—true magic. I’m not sure how Sampsell accomplished this feat of a novel, but I do know I’ll be coming back to it for years to come, trying to figure out how he pulled it off. — Emme Lund, author of The Boy With The Bird In His Chest

What a strange and wondrous document this book is. Kevin Sampsell's voice is wholly his own—an embodiment of the early 21st century with its homeless population, its struggles with drugs, its social fabric that somehow still has the innocence of a small village in some distant, rural place. Within these pages you will encounter people in the midst of their tragic lives, all beset by the daily sufferings of late-stage, metastatic capitalism. And through it all wanders an impossible baby—a kid who both is and isn't a kid—who is a version of all of us, walking in the cold, moonlit dark. If you like Denis Johnson and Hubert Selby Jr. and the boxes of Joseph Cornell, you will love Baby in the Night, Kevin Sampsell's magic, miniature marvel. — Pauls Toutonghi, author of The Refugee Ocean

Praise for Kevin Sampsell

Kevin Sampsell is the original unadorned romantic. His writing makes you love him, and it's easy all the way down. — Susie Bright, author of Big Sex, Little Death

For beauty, honesty, sheer weirdness, and a haunting evocation of place, Kevin Sampsell is my favorite Oregon writer. Ken Kesey, Chuck Palahniuk—make some room on the shelf. — Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of it All

Kevin Sampsell straddles the line between candor and oversharing with an artful grace I found infectious. — Patrick deWitt, author of Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers

Save 20% off list price by ordering this book directly from Impeller Press or our distributor Asterism. Let your local bookstore know that we’re distributed through Asterism!

Kevin Sampsell is a Portland writer, collage artist, bookseller, and the publisher of Future Tense Books. His previous books include the novel This Is Between Us, the memoir A Common Pornography, the illustrated book Sean the Stick, and I Made an Accident, a collection of poems and collages. His stories and essays have appeared in many publications including Salon, The Believer, Joyland, Southwest Review, Diagram, Longreads, The Rumpus, Tin House, McSweeney's, and Best American Essays.

US$20
240pp / 5.5x8” / perfect-bound paperback
Printed and bound in the US by Ingram Publishing Services
Distributed by Asterism
Impeller Press Books B-020
ISBN 9781967136001
Publication date: March 17, 2026