Every cell in Chris Adrian's body is engaged in a tireless battle against death. In his day job, his author bio informs us, he is both "a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology at UCSF" and "a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School." When he's not saving children from death or studying the belief that the soul can survive death, he's writing about our struggle with mortality. His underrated debut novel, Gob's Grief, was about a fragile genius's attempts to build a machine to resurrect all the young men killed in the Civil War. His second book, The Children's Hospital, was a contemporary retelling of the biblical flood, complete with angels, with a hospital in place of the ark.

Adrian's new book, The Great Night, feels lighter—in the best way possible—than his other two novels. It breezes in at just under 300 pages, and while many of the characters are racked with grief, the book is a comedy in the classical Shakespearean sense, in that it ends with a beginning. The Great Night also lifts the mythological elements—the fairies—from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and drops them into Buena Vista Park in modern-day San Francisco. (It's important to note that while Titania, Puck, and the rest could have walked directly offstage from the play, the reader doesn't need to bring any prior experience with them to enjoy The Great Night; it stands on its own.) The fairies interact with three heartbroken humans, manipulating them, as magical creatures are known to do. Fans of Neil Gaiman would enjoy a tumble with this book, finding a familiar comfort in the beachhead between fantasy and reality.

But the most heartening thing about The Great Night is that Adrian focuses on one of the happiest ways humans do battle with death every day—which is a polite way of saying that the book is full of fucking. It practically pulses with it: Gay sex, straight sex, oral sex, mind-blowing first-encounter sex that literally changes lives. This blatant sexuality reminds the reader what a fuckless place modern literary fiction has become; if not for the occasional dysfunctional masturbation scene, the main characters of many literary novels may as well be smooth-crotched plastic dolls. Because The Great Night is a fantasy, the sex even clambers to a life of its own, as when one character encounters a sea of "disembodied penises, softly shambling toward him on variously sized testicle feet" that "nuzzled around his ankles... as harmless as a roiling basket of puppies."

Adrian wasn't a prude before, but The Great Night's sexual ardor feels transcendent. It seems that he answers some of his earlier questions with this bighearted party of a novel: How do we survive in a world where death stalks us all, with no remorse or reason? Simple. We love, and then we love again, and we love every which we can.