Night of Light is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel by American writer Philip Jose Farmer

Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer was an American author, principally known for his award-winning science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories....

. It was published in June 1957 by Lawrence E. Spivak

Lawrence E. Spivak

Lawrence Edmund Spivak was an American publisher and journalist who was best known as the co-founder, producer and host of the prestigious public affairs program Meet the Press...

's publishing house, The Mercury Press, Inc. It was published a second time in 1966 by Berkeley Medallion Books with copyright reserved to the author. It has been recently reprinted by Subterranean Press in the collection The Other in the Mirror.

Plot

In a world in orbit around a binary system, once every 5 years it is bathed in a bizarre radiance that rearranges physical reality. To cope with this, most inhabitants go to sleep for the entire two week period. To stay asleep, some of the inhabitants take a special medicine that keeps them under for the whole two week period. Only mystics, newcomers, and devotees to the bizarre religion are willing to stay awake and endure the two weeks of brilliance, where things materialize out of thin air. According to their religion, people undergo an unpredictable change, and many actually die. The good become better, and the bad become worse. One woman's husband metamorphosized into a tree. Another person was chased down streets by statues that came to life. But facing the brilliance is also a rite of passage if you must develop as a being inclined towards acts of goodness, or a being inclined towards acts of evil. It is during those two weeks that the good are pitted against the bad, and it is also a time when their living god must face his successor.

To help in the conversion effort, Catholic missionaries have been sent to the planet to help reconcile the planet's religion with their own universal

Catholic

The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

faith. The only problem, is that the planet's religion appears to be spreading across the stars.