On an otherwise ordinary Friday night, Carol Ann Page nearly slices off the top of her thumb while trying to open an aggressively overwrapped package from her ex-husband. While in the emergency room, she’s startled to see “light shining out of her incision.”

She assumes that she’s hallucinating under the influence of shock, pain and drugs. But according to television reports, at that very moment light suddenly began “pouring from the injuries of the sick and wounded” all around the world.

In fact, this strange and eerily beautiful radiance, which quickly becomes known as the Illumination, glows from every source of pain, including the news anchor’s headache and the aching neck of Carol Ann’s stressed doctor. No longer can anyone conceal their wounds or disorders.

Before readers can begin to assimilate this disquieting vision of radiant suffering, Carol Ann, kept overnight for observation, gets a roommate. Certain that her husband has not survived the car crash that has landed her in the hospital, lovely Patricia tells Carol Ann to keep her journal. In it she has copied the notes her husband left her every morning, each naming a different reason he loves her.

The light flaring from Patricia’s fatal injuries is so intense that a doctor calls for sunglasses.

Arkansas writer and Guggenheim fellow Kevin Brockmeier is a fabulist with soul. The celebrated author of two short-story collections, two children’s books and two previous novels, including The Brief History of the Dead, he adeptly combines elegant fantasy with psychological realism and metaphysical inquiry.

In this gracefully imagined, somber yet beguiling novel, Brockmeier pushes a ravishing metaphor to the limits in an attempt to unlock our psyches and the code for our capacity for good and evil. He also is intrigued by how stories shape our lives, turning Patricia’s book of love into an enigmatic sacred text.

The journal is sweet, poetic, funny, and hypnotic: “I love the way you alphabetize CDs, but arrange the books by height. I love you in your blue winter coat that looks like upholstery fabric. I love the scent of your hair just after you’ve taken a shower.” Carol Ann is the first of a half-dozen characters who, by design or chance, acquire the notebook and become bewitched and puzzled by its ardor and cleverness.

A grieving photojournalist, Jason is drawn to a pack of teenagers. “Their arms and legs were patterned with dozens of freshly inflicted injuries.“As he raises his camera, a girl presses a lit cigarette against the inside of her wrist. Jason takes a picture of the subsequent “magnificent wave of light”, and Melissa becomes an unlikely mentor, teaching him how to use physical pain to eradicate psychic agony, the worst affliction of all.

Chuck is a strangely sensitive and gentle boy so traumatized by his father’s cruelty that he has stopped speaking. Chuck has always been able to detect suffering in people, animals, even objects. “Everything was helpless and needed to be saved from harm,” he thinks. Including the love-note journal, which he spies, ablaze, in Jason’s house.

Ryan is a reluctant but dutiful evangelical, patiently handing out leaflets door-to-door, until one day he is handed the book of love in return. After his sister’s death, he travels the world as a missionary, even though his private beliefs diverge from those of his church.

Like a tormented hero in a grim myth, wherever Ryan goes, disaster strikes. A terrorist bomb in Burkina Faso, an earthquake in Tunisia, the tsunami in Indonesia, a stadium collapse in Costa Rica, a tornado in Missouri. He walks away from each catastrophe physically unscathed but increasingly burdened with survivor’s guilt.

Brockmeier deepens his scrutiny of the power and perils of stories in his portrayals of Nina, who finds the book of love in a hotel room, and homeless Morse. She is a love-starved writer whose oddly persistent mouth ulcers shoot out disconcerting spears of light.

Morse is a man of generosity and valor who sells used books on the street. When the notebook comes into his possession, Morse is both “fascinated and vexed” by it. As are we by this humble man’s brutal fate.

What does the Illumination mean? Ryan wonders if pain emits light because God is now paying more concentrated and compassionate attention to humankind.

Or is it the opposite? “That he loved us because we suffered, and our suffering was pleasing to his eyes.” Does this dramatic visual manifestation of pain make people kinder? Will the Illumination “herald a new age of reconciliation and earthly brotherhood?” Or does the light become as commonplace and undervalued as the blue of the sky or a child’s joy? Brockmeier may write an elevated form of fantasy, but he tells the truth, however stark.

Brockmeier is unerring in this enveloping and beautifully astute spiritual drama. His vision of pain as light is gorgeously provocative in its illumination of the universality of suffering. Each character is a shimmering galaxy of longing, hope and resilience. And the book of love is bright testimony to the possibility and succor of steadfast attention and gratitude.

Brockmeier’s tender imagination and philosophical concerns, the dignity he accords his characters, the risks they take and the connections they forge coalesce in a magnetic, indelible, mysterious yet forthright novel of rare compassion, gravitas and resplendence.