Difficult Nights appeared in 1971 and was the last book of stories published during the author's lifetime. In it are all the obsessions of the best Buzzati: the mysterious dimension of reality, the sense of time and waiting, the nightmare of fear and death; all of this barely veiled under the irony and deceptive layer of the everyday and the trivial. "The fantastic," Buzzati stated, "must lead to a form of reality."