Noctuary, by Thomas Ligotti **7/8

This collection of modern weird fiction (filed as horror) was a nice surprise. I discovered Ligotti while reading through a bunch of stuff on the internet, and Noctuary was the first collection of his that I came across at a used book store, so I bought it. [more on Ligotti's works at the end of this review.] This collection contains 8 stories and something like 19 sketches. All of the stories were solid, with strange settings, 1-2 bizarre and fascinating characters, and a good core concept or two. In a couple of cases he created his own mythology, cult, or strange god, while some of the other stories were more about the oddness all around us - sadness inherent in Halloween, an approaching death, etc. I really liked the tone of these stories, and Ligotti is a master at gauging the divulgence of information. And none of these stories has a round, full conclusion, which is fine with me. To give you an idea of my opinion of this book and the uniqueness of the tone of the writing - while in the middle of the fourth story in this collection, I went online and ordered two more of his books [details below].

Note that I didn't LOVE this collection, as evidenced by the mere **7/8 rating, but it made for a good reading experience because it contains consistent, nice-sized stories (15-25 pages) that allow for plot development. No story in here would qualify as transcendent, but they're all solid, and I expect that this is the case with most of Ligotti's work.

My biggest complaint about this book by far is that I didn't particularly enjoy the sketches, which take up the last 50 pages of this book. In fact, my star rating is really just for the 8 stories and not the sketches. The sketches are fine, and I wouldn't have minded reading 2-3 of them, but 19? That's a lot of not much, in my opinion. 1-2 of the sketches created something memorable, but for the most part I just wanted to make it through to the end so I could start reading my next book.

Ligotti has something of a fan following from what I can tell online, though it seems he hasn't done much that would interest me since the writing of Noctuary in the mid-90s. Prior to this collection, he had written Grimscribe and Songs of a Dead Dreamer, both of which are similar in terms of size and content from what I understand. Almost all (or maybe all) of the stories in these three books are collected in his The Nightmare Factory, which was printed in the mid-90s. It seems that since then Ligotti has been releasing recordings of verse or character studies on CD, maybe even a recording with musicians? I'm a bit confused, but it doesn't sound like he's doing a whole lot more of what I want him to do, which is write short stories. There was another collection of three stories in the early 2000s, though I think it's extremely short, and as of this writing he has just released yet another collection that includes some of his previously published material. Seems a bit like an attempt to make more money without creating anything new. For now, I'm going to go back and read both Grimscribe and Songs of a Dead Dreamer (both of which I purchased online), and then depending on how much I enjoy those I'll keep an eye out for new work by Ligotti.
(spring 2006)

Close this window