Grimscribe, by Thomas Ligotti ***1/2

My favorite Ligotti collection, this is be the best collection of horror stories I have ever read. It's just so consistent in quality, and I love his prose style. This collection isn't uniformly better than everything else of Ligotti's, it's just that the variety and flavor of each and every story is spot on, and the cumulative effect was a bit more powerful by the end of the collection. Since I've written about Ligotti in my reviews of Noctuary and Songs of a Dead Dreamer, I won't spend too much more effort recounting those thoughts here; the writing and approach is similar in this book as it is in those, with nice-sized stories (15-25 pages) that are atmospheric, eerie, thought-provoking, and beautifully-written. For anyone looking to start reading Ligotti, I would recommend beginning either with this book or just spending the $100 or so to get The Nightmare Factory, since that includes all of Grimscribe, Noctuary, and Songs of a Dead Dreamer, plus a few other stories that don't appear anywhere else. [note - Teatro Grottesco just came out in December 2007, so now it's probably better to get all the individual books including TG instead of Nightmare Factory, which includes some of the TG stuff but not all of it.

(Fall 2007)

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