Noctuary & the Spectral Link

by Thomas Ligotti, Paul Romano (Illustrator)

Chiroptera Press presents Noctuary & The Spectral Link by the legendary Thomas Ligotti, a consolidated volume of two horror collections, brought back into print for the first time in over a decade. This edition from Chiroptera Press follows the success of other high-quality, deluxe Ligotti publications, most recently Ligotti's narrative and lyric poetry tour de force, Pictures of Apocalypse.

Noctuary is divided into three sections, following Ligotti’s famous introduction, “In the Night, in the Dark: A Note on the Appreciation of Weird Fiction”: Studies in Shadow, Discourse on Blackness, and Notebook of the Night. Section One, Studies in Shadow, begins with "The Medusa,” which follows the protagonist's lifelong obsession with the deadly gorgon of myth, blurring the lines between fiction, metaphor, and reality. "Conversations in a Dead Language" chronicles three consecutive Halloween nights in the life of a mailman whose unspeakable proclivities lead to a shadowy doom. "The Prodigy of Dreams" follows the elderly Arthur Emerson, whose prayers years before to an obscure god are finally answered. "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel" concerns a child with extreme nightmares, leading his mother to seek dubious assistance from a wise woman and her supernatural partner. Section two, Discourse on Blackness, begins with "The Tsalal," an epic and apocalyptic novelette, which introduces readers to the skeleton town of Moxton and the enigmatic Andrew Maness, from whom an ancient power grows. "Mad Night of Atonement" presents a disgraced scientist whose latest invention channels the bleak power of the Creator Itself, while "The Strange Design of Master Rignolo" follows a visual artist's ambition to insert himself into his own artwork, leading to absolute madness. Lastly, "The Voice in the Bones" evokes a prisoner within a surreal prison that exists as both fiction and reality. The third section, Notebook of the Night, features twenty remarkable vignettes exploring insidious exploits, esoteric rituals, and hymns to the void.

The Spectral Link, Ligotti’s most recently published short story collection, emerged following his near-death experience on the surgeon's table. The first novelette, "Metaphysica Morum," channels all the rage and despair of Ligotti's nonfiction treatise, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, in both stark and hilarious form. The combined volume ends with Ligotti’s poignant masterpiece, "The Small People," exploring the uncanny terror of being alive in a world where we can never be certain who and what we are.

Noctuary & The Spectral Link, published by Chiroptera Press, presents these timeless collections in the high-quality format that the press is known for—the perfect edition for Ligotti aficionados and newcomers to his work alike.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Weird Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Anthologies, Collections

268 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror author and reclusive literary cult figure. His writings, while unique in style, have been noted as major continuations of several literary genres—most prominently Lovecraftian horror—and have overall been described as works of "philosophical horror", often written as philosophical novels with a "darker" undertone which is similar to gothic fiction. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"; another critic declared "It's a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage."

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noctuary strikes me as being Thomas Ligotti's major collection of short fiction, presenting his most significant works in the form, such as "The Medusa" and "The Tsalal". There are some weaker efforts in the section of very short works titled "Notebook of the Night", but the same section also contains some of Ligotti's very best, such as "The Order of Illusion".

This edition from Chiroptera Press also includes a couple of more recent stories from Ligotti's pen that were originally published as The Spectral Link. The first of these stories ("Metaphysica Morum") is nothing special, but "The Small People" evinces what Ligotti does so well: exploring profound ideas regarding the very notion of human existence in the form of weird fiction. This latter is a story that I will need to revisit soon, since it is swirling with the potent magic of dark dreams and collapsing illusions.

As an outro, I can't help but quote from "Mad Night of Atonement", a story from Noctuary that is central to Ligotti's considerable achievement in fiction, and central to his bleak but compelling vision of our prevailing reality:

I noticed that there were mechanisms built into the system of reality that nullified all our advancements in this world, rerouting them into a hidden laboratory where these so-called blessings were canceled out altogether, if not converted into formulas for our collapse. I noticed that there were higher forces working against us and working through us at the same time. On the one hand, our vision has always been of creating a world of perpetual vitality, despite our grudging recognition of death's 'necessity.' On the other hand, all we have constructed is an elaborate façade to conceal our immortal traumas, a false front that hides the perennial ordeals of the human race. Oh, the human race. And I began to see that perfection has never been the point, that both the lost paradise of the past and the one sought in the future were merely convenient pretexts for our true destiny of ... disintegration.

[Zac Hawkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was beginning to lose hope I'd ever get the chance to read these, closing the year out with those final chilling words of The Little People hits pretty hard. Noctuary frankly rivals Grimscribe for my favourite selection of tales by Ligotti, simply inspired hallowed prose.
2023 has been a good year, wishing all the best for the next.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally able to read this collection (Noctuary) and read a physical copy of the stories in The Spectral Link. Parts of Noctuary didn't do much for me (the third section of very short pieces in particular was kind of hit and miss), but the book overall was a great read.

[Kaisu Koskelin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating style of small plots.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not possible yet to get a reasonably priced print version of these two books which are now in one volume so I am reviewing the audio book which is far from satisfactory, albeit that the reading by John Padgett is superb ... dead pan and yet expressive with clear enunciation and a sense of the weird.

I came to Ligotti through his later 2000s work ('My Work is Not Yet Done' (2001) , 'The Shadow at the Bottom of the World' (2005) and 'Teatro Grottesco' (2006) and as well as his 'philosophical' nihilist 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' (2010)) and was very impressed.

The last three I have reviewed on GoodReads although not yet 'The Shadow'. I was much less impressed by his post-Lovecraftian philosophical pessimism which struck me as indicating him as having some clinical issue more than offering a guide to our human-centred reality.

Nevertheless, the 'philosophy' is essential to understanding the art. Ligotti's vision goes beyond the weird into realms of existential horror that are far from abstract. His literary world is something I have advised people not to read in certain cases. It could trigger existing propensities to breakdown.

I then turned to the earlier works ('Songs of a Dead Dreamer' (1986) and 'Grimscribe' (1991)) but was disappointed at more conventional and stylised material. Now I come to 'Noctuary' (1991) with some trepidation while I feared that 'Spectral Link' (2014) might be overwhelmed by his 'philosophising'.

I was wrong on both counts to the extent that I consider 'Noctuary' the best starting point for an assessment of Ligotti as a true literary master of radical weird horror and as heir to Poe in the first instance and Lovecraft in the second.

Is the avoidance of making it easily available - with strange obfuscatory aspects to its availability, at least on the British version of Amazon - a stratagem of some kind or marketing manipulation or just an accident of publishing a rather strange author?

Ligotti's introduction is actually not very interesting as if he had still not thought through his philosophy while 'The Medusa' is merely weird and mannered, closer to the first two books, but these are succeeded by a number of tales of pure genius.

At the top of the list has to be 'The Tsalal' which is a work that inverts Christianity into a blasphemous abomination but which also shows a deep understanding of the impossible absurdities demanded by Paul in the First Century AD and accepted ever since.

If it was not so shocking and subversive, it might serve as a significant exercise in any literature class of how meaning can be twisted into entirely new forms by taking what we have taken for granted and giving it an entirely opposite cosmic twist.

Another minor masterpiece is 'Conversations in a Dead Language' which links the 'meaning' of Halloween (which seems to be replacing Christmas as the children's festival of the Americans) to the type of the lonely male hovering constantly on the brink of predation.

The horror lies in ourselves as Ligotti seems to get inside this lonely man and draw us into being 'simpatico' with precisely the sort of human being regarded as the lowest of the low in our society. We sense the existential origins of predatory evil and wonder at a world that allows this to be.

There is an oddity in Ligotti's story in that he has identified elsewhere as a 'socialist' (which, of course, always means something different in the US than in Europe). This stands against his philosophy but there is something of a socialist mentality in this care for the outcast.

The claim cannot be judged here but it suggests that Ligotti is a complex character whose mind works at several levels and whose carefully considered and drafted literary project should not be assumed to represent all that there is to the man.

There are hints of a kind of depressed and angry 'socialism' in some of his mid period stories about the corporatism that oppresses humans and which is part of a world of entropy. We are also aware that, whereas European socialism is generally bouncy and optimistic, the American version is not.

All the other stories are worth reading with an eye to their origins in the history of weird fiction. Ligotti is still looking backwards somewhat but just doing a much better job than before in responding to the past. Perhaps 'Mad Night of Atonement' is the most interesting in a philosophical sense.

In this story, we have another black anti-theological tale which shows how Ligotti has the capacity to understand fully what he is subverting. The 'Light' and the 'Life' of the Christian God is reversed into a cosmic condition of inherent entropy devoutly to be wished for.

We are moving on from describing the world in terms of entropy to considering entropy as the 'good' of an alternative reading of reality, as if this alternative entropic religion is what is required because the universe will stop expanding and reverse course or simply flatten out into nothingness.

Cosmology is ultimately on his side except that cosmology has nothing to say about how we respond to its 'truths'. Ligotti responds in a logical way in looking at the grand scheme of things but, of course, we humans always choose to create something else outside the grand scheme of things.

Philosophically he is cogent, building on Lovecraft, but then Adolf Hitler was cogent, building on Darwin, yet his philosophy has no inherent meaning other than that he (not the universe) makes it mean what he concludes it to mean. His is ultimately fiction, not reality.

Is the fiction valuable to us? Yes, just as De Sade's fiction is valuable. It sets an honest point of extremis against which we can test ourselves imaginatively. 'Les Cent Journees' never happened or could happen and neither can anything in a Ligotti story. They are symbolic.

In both cases, the reader (this is why I would deter most people from reading such material while never censoring their availability) is enabled to face a choice without actually having to choose in reality - exactly what are the limits to desire and to philosophy in these cases?

You read De Sade or Ligotti in their respective spheres of sex/violence and blasphemous negativity and you can then 'choose' whether what they write is 'true' as either an aspiration in the world (De Sade) or as a true picture of underlying reality (Ligotti) and then respond accordingly.

The act of choosing strengthens us through acceptance or rejection. Acceptance in the two cases leads to a profound disconnection and dysfunctionality within our species-world which if acted upon must lead to incarceration or worse in one case and madness or suicide in the other.

In fact, the person who works through such choices is likely to explore secret desires and cosmic despair only as potentialities imaginatively and emerge less likely to do unthinking acts of oppression, brutality or self harm. They have been inoculated against 'evil' by engaging with it as 'story'.

Thus it becomes true that 'what does not kill strengthens'. The Nietzschean life instinct emerges stronger against both Sadism and philosophical pessimism. The myth of the eternal return then re-emerges as counter to the reality of cosmic entropy and our species moves forward.

The 'Spectral Link' (2014) emerges after the philosophy has been laid out in 'Conspiracy'. There seems to be nothing written other than poetry since. He is 73 and perhaps there is more within him to tell in prose but equally perhaps he may have exhausted what nihilism can speak of.

Nevertheless, this too is worth reading, coming after, we are told, his own near-death experience. There are two powerful tales here of some length. Both are masterpieces that relate directly to his philosophical pessimism.

The first 'Metaphysica Morum' is a relentless exploration of the useless search for meaning as its 'hero' relates to a rather dubious psychotherapist, perhaps expressing doubts about that profession that all who have come into contact with it probably experience.

Like all good literature of this type, the skill lies in being suggestive more than in being explicit so we are left with a mood of nihilistic despair as life is constantly clung onto despite its nature. It is as if we (in Ligotti's world) constantly try and evade the logic of our (Ligotti's) analysis of that world.

The second, 'Small People', is marvellously subversive and teeters constantly on the edge of social commentary as if Ligotti's possible inner loathing of 'the they' is being exorcised through the paranoia of a madman in an asylum (a favourite weird fiction trope).

This 'hero' is called a bigot because of his attitude to a parallel world of 'small people' who appear to invade the spaces of us in the real world but are like mechanical toys operating in a hive-like way, building only simulacra of our towns and society.

This is a clinically paranoid fantasy where the asylum inhabitant extends his fears to 'half smalls' (including, he claims, his parents) who infiltrate real society to assist in the invasion of the smalls. The framing is that he is mad but, as in these cases, we are allowed a doubt that he is not.

This is a classic American science fiction trope similar to 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', drawn from that culture's natural propensity to social paranoia but the story is superbly told, building up belief in the possible reality of the madman's fears much as the sci-fi versions would do.

Where this is supremely subversive is in the way it over-turns what we should think socially in much the same way as he did in 1992 with 'Conversations in a Dead Language' - just as he skilfully humanised a potential sexual predator so he works on our liberal tolerances in the same way.

His literary sympathy appears to be with someone who is only one step from the 'worst kind of racist' (where smallness is just code for difference) and whose mental map is positioned as first vicious and then insane by a world evading the reality of the smalls (if they exist).

The ambiguity is as rich as it is in the case of the predator. The proto-predator is what he is by the nature of his being in an unfriendly world and so is our paranoid madman (if he is mad). Either he is mad or he is seeing a truth of alien infiltration being permitted by a wider refusal to 'see'.

Strangely, the framing moderates the blackness of Ligotti's earlier work because the story is probably to be interpreted as a realist account of a fantasy rather than his earlier tendency to present dark fantasy as real. If so, the man is mad which means that society has become sane and sound at last.

By 2014, we have two finely tuned tales where the horror remains cosmic (in terms of the first's philosophical underpinning in cosmic pessimism and nihilism) but has been directed away from the supernaturally weird towards the weirdness of simply being human in such a world.

The second story may offset the first story to some extent and so all of Ligotti's work to date! Does he close here by presenting the darkest human version of his nihilist stance only to 're-socialise' that stance as paranoid dark fantasy? Ambiguity can be the essence of art.

Whether it is the nihilistic individual unable decisively to follow the logic of an absurd existence or the outsider and social reject trying to create meaning out of a conspiracy theory (also very central to American culture), these are still tales of total human despair.

So, why should one bother to read such anti-humanist and dark material? Life is short and there are many flowers to sniff. We would say because it is great literary art at its best and because Ligotti makes you think about extremity and so think about the mode of rejection of his philosophy.

Of course, I feel sorry for those who cannot or do not reject it. They are doomed to exist in a state of depressed misery but that probably has nothing to do with Ligotti - it is just who they are. They are looking for a philosophical peg on which to put their hard-wired mental hat.

For the rest of us, it is a case of whether we choose to choose - that is, whether we evade cosmic realities out of fear or embrace them and grow strong. However, the American dark weird that took us from Poe via Lovecraft to Ligotti can probably go no further now.

We are at the terminus and simply have to get out of the train and walk the rest of the way without relying on philosophical or social systems. I hope no one decides to throw themselves under its wheels as a result of reading Ligotti but that would still be their choice.

[Shaun Rosel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️5/5 stars

Noctuary and The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti (Audiobook narrated by Jon Padgett)

Where to begin. This was my first Ligotti. And damn, it will not be my last. This was a fever dream of a reading experience. Comprising of 29 shorts, it’s hard to put into words what this book is about. These are not stories where you have the usual plot beginning, middle and end. There are no heavy character developments, with the protagonists (victims?) often remaining unnamed. These are snippets of dream sequences and nightmares. Don’t go into this thinking of the usual fare of storytelling. You will flow through these stories as if you floating on gently moving river. This book is an event, an experience, an epiphany.

Prose and Themes. Thomas Ligotti’s prose is something else. It’s very beautiful and poignant. I’m not the biggest poetry fan, but these words and phrases flow so eloquently, it’s what I imagine poetry enthusiasts feel when they are blown away by a beautiful verse. I would almost call it poetry in of itself. He makes the macabre and nightmarish subject matter of these stories something you want to be immersed in and never leave. The themes are always dark and existential. What happens to your soul in the moments after your passing. Purgatory worlds and hellscapes that end abruptly or never at all. I often found myself lost or out of my depth, not quite feeling smart enough to grasp the true meanings of stories. But I didn’t care. It did not detract from the wonderful experience I had. It’s something you just have to let happen to you. Is this horror? The subject matter certainly pertains to it. But it is not in the usual sense of horror. It’s definitely weird, which is one of my favourite ‘genres’.

The audiobook is narrated by Jon Padgett. His voice pairs perfectly with Ligotti’s poetic prose. His soft and leathery tones are gentle and guiding, as if a scholar is instructing you on the meaning of life. Or afterlife. Padgett and Ligotti combine to make one of the best damn reading experiences I’ve ever had. Luckily Padgett has narrated Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. He has also just finished recording The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. So I have plenty more to look forward to.

If you have never read Ligotti, I wholeheartedly recommend doing so by audiobook. If anything I’ve described appeals to you, you will not disappointed.

[Andrew Nolan]

2025, the year I finally revisited Aickman again after an aborted earlier attempt and realized I enjoy his work immensely is also the same year I finally realized that Ligotti is not the writer for me.

I remember liking My Work is Not Yet Done when it came out, but none of his other works have resonated with me. I’ve tried, it’s not Ligotti, it’s me, and I suspect that that Ligotti’s underlying pessimism is something I’m no longer searching for in art and taints the work for me.

[Alan Tao · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

A slightly more uneven collection than Songs and Teatro Grotessco. Nonetheless, still mostly good.

Some of the stories here are all time Ligotti greats - The Medusa, The Tsalal, Mad Night of Atonement, the Voice in the Bones. These are all classic Ligottian tales, full of evocations and suggestions, written in a hazily neutral tone that implies far more than it actually says. These are stories of strange and terrifying concepts and creatures which linger in the brain long after the last word. I particularly enjoyed the "skeleton town" of The Tsalal, where reality itself becomes slowly unmade by something behind the curtain, as well as the maddening ambiguities behind the rotting tower of Voice in the Bones. The other stories, while not as memorable, are all uniformly creepy and unnerving in the classic Ligotti style.

What lost me slightly was the "notebook of the night" section, which was around 20 1-3 pg stories. While some of these did manage to convey some evocative and horrifying tales with great economy, others seemed too fragmented and disjointed, inducing a sense of unsatisfied confusion rather than ambiguous dread. Still, on the whole there were more successes than failures, and even mediocre Ligotti is worth reading.

Overall, i like this collection slightly less than the other two, but still like it very much.

[Tobin Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've come to the conclusion that, as much as I love Ligotti—and I truly do love Ligotti's work—I'll always be chasing, but never finding, that high I experienced with the first encounter with his weird fiction.

The works here are good, and very often great. All the hallmarks are here...the ambiguous narrators, the strange towns and the stranger goings-on in the towns, the plot elements broken up by bizarre soliloquies or monologues or observations, and a pervasive undercurrent of unease, both from the characters in the stories, and myself as the reader.

To read Ligotti is to feel like you kind of know what's going on, but you're aware of a vast amount of malevolent machinery operating just out of sight. And that, should your attention waver for even a moment, you're going to get caught in that machinery and no one will ever know what happened to you, that you simply disappeared into the malevolence.

[Caesar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this collection to be quite disappointing. It lacked the horror elements I was hoping for, and while some stories were better than others, it didn't say much about the collection as a whole. There was a noticeable absence of suspense and mystery, and even the author's vivid imagination failed to capture my interest. Admittedly, I'm not a fan of horror, so my bias against the genre may have influenced my perception from the beginning.
Overall, I didn't like this book and was very disappointed with it.
Pros:
I found the author's writing style appealing. The reader, through the book’s characters, experiences a sense of being immersed in a state of suspension between reality and lucid dreaming with a dreadful realization that the boundary between the two is indiscernible. This sensation evokes brief panic and an eerie feeling of being out of control. Horror? Perhaps. Well done.

[Certified Not-Lame · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unstoppable dread. Hopeless characters that know to little, or to much.

The Medusa - 4
Conversations In A Dead Language - 5
The Prodigy Of Dreams - 4
Mrs Rinaldi's Angel - 4
The Tsalal - 5
Mad Night Of Atonement - 5
The Strange Design Of Master Rignolo - 5
The Voice In The Bones -5
The Master's Eyes Shining With Secrets - 4
The Inquisitor - 4
The New Faces Of The City - 5
Autumnal - 4
One May Be Dreaming - 4
Suicide By Imagination - 5
The Unfamiliar - 4
The Career Of Nightmares - 4
The Premature Transfiguration - 5
The Demon Man - 4
The Puppet Masters - 4
The Spectral Estate - 4
Primordial Loathing - 4
Nameless Horror - 5
The Mocking Mystery - 4
The Interminable Equation - 3
The Eternal Mirage - 4
The Order Of Illusion - 4
Charnel House Of The Moon - 5
Ten Steps To Thin Mountain - 4
Metaphysica Morum - 4
The Small People - 5

[Muse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is likely the truest embodiment of Ligotti's work, especially in "The Medusa" and "The Tsalal" (my personal favorite from the collection). I will argue that the narration for the audiobook version is lackluster but the prose itself, the overall atmosphere of dread and the philosophical meditations on what weird fiction actually *is* is in no way diminished by it. I know people like to compare him to Lovecraft but I would say he is a culmination (and evolution) of his forebears in the genre; wedding the best of Lovecraftian elements with the most lyrical of Poe's gothic prose. Definitely a must-read for fans of the genre.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an even more standout collection than Grimscribe; Ligotti is really in top form here. But he's also one of the most exhausting authors I've read. These stories revel in death, decay, and doomerism. There is no hope, and very little humor (except in the story The Small People). Ligotti is severely mentally ill. In an interview he said he spent ten years in a severe depressive state where he could not work, let alone function. I had planned to follow this up with Teatro Grottesco, but I think I need a break now.

[David Wagner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I probably overexposed myself to Ligotti. after finishing the Conspiracy against Human Race, I went to this horror collection.
And while the writing is still great, the atmosphere somber etc etc it is just too much of the same. Life does not make sense, things are awful, everything comes to some gruesome ending: and it is hard to care about it in any way, because the characters have the same lifeless, unsympathethic qualities as heroes of Lovecraft: sometimes they feel worse honestly, just spectators to their own inevitable end. In the end, it just felt so very bland.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't tell if it's Ligotti's word choice or the narrator's voice but for the majority of these stories had me zoning out and falling asleep. "Ms. Rinaldi's Angel" and "The Small People" were very enjoyable exceptions to this criticism. The book is not worth the cost even with the good stories IMO. Just buy "The Spectral Link" to read "The Small People" and stop there.

You'd enjoy this book if you like: Highbrow horror

You'd dislike this book if: Mood setting and immersion is important to your horror. If thesauruses are definitively un-scary.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audiobook
I remember liking Songs of a Dead Dreamer enough when I read it a few years ago, but this did nothing for me. The two stories in The Spectral Link part were the best of the bunch, but even then I wasn’t wowed by them. I need to read more Ligotti now to figure out where I stand on his work.

[Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt it lacked some of the strange surrealism and absurdism of stories found in 'Teatro Grottesco' and 'Songs of a Dead Dreamer'. This collection felt more in line with 'Conspiracy...'. Definitely grab if you're a Ligotti fan, regardless.

[Ryan Melander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short story ranking:

1. The Voice in the Bones
2. The Tsalal
3. The Strange Design of Master Rignolo
4. The Small People
5. Ms. Rinaldi’s Angel
6. Mad Night of Atonement
7. The Medusa
8. Conversations in a Dead Language
9. Metaphysica Morum
10. The Prodigy of Dreams

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good mix of shorts and short shorts. Some of these are pretty bleak and a few are lighter than expected from Ligotti. Overall a very nice 4 Star collection

[Johnny D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this publisher needs to hire a proofreader, paying premium price for missing and duplicate chapters is a real turn off. Not that impressed with my first Ligotti book.

[Ben Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horrific, sublime and amazingly haunting

[Robby Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not finish. The stories just weren’t catching my interest

[Kitn]

Reads like Alex Jones doing HP Lovecraft

[verec · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author: To me, Ligotti is hard to grasp, but not what he's coming from. He seems like one of those legendary prophets you hear about, who've unlocked knowledge beyond what can simply be told. It's experience, and it's gnosis. Not sure if anything else can be said, other than that I've never read an author who manages to penetrate what the rest of us calls reality. Maybe his non-fiction is most candid in this, but it permeates his books, and if you've glimpsed it once it's hard to unsee. But at the same time, at least initially, he seemed reluctant to share this, or maybe his vision was not at that time perfectly clear. I won't write about his philosophy and symbology and the themes because I think they must be experienced, but it might not be for all. This analog is pretentious and probably not true, but it could be likened to a red and a blue pill; red and you read, blue and you simply go on with your life like you never got close to something truly scary. The Necronomicon was never picked up, and your dreams remain fluffy and fleeting.

The text: This is similar to his other publications, a short story collection divided into segments with loose themes. I'm no expert on Ligotti, so maybe someone might tell me it was due to the part being published at different times and compiled later on etc, but to me it's the texts that matter. The way Ligotti writes varies, but it is generally the heavy and purple prose one finds in inspirations such as Lovecraft. It's generally not my cup of tea, but for Ligotti each word tends to have a meaning. In that sense it reminds me of J. Joyce. And many can (and should!) be read again, and the experience can, and will, change. One of my absolute favorites was in this very volume, The Strange Design of Master Rignolo, and if you only should read one novel in this anthology I think it's that one. And Medusa… But there are also stories which you should read out loud, like Mad Night of Atonement. The stories are dark though and, like I mentioned initially, a sneak peak at what might lie beyond what we take for granted.

The characters: We are always distant from his characters. We might know what they think and do and why, but they are always strangers to us. Alien to us. They portrait often portrait thoughts that we never have, or at least pretend we never have. Doubts that we never have, or at least pretend we never have. Impulses that we never have, or at least pretend we never have. And not only those hidden from those other alien beings we see every day, those so far removed from us that they might as well be on another planet or galaxy all together… No, it's what we also hide from ourselves.

The description: The descriptions are however important, but not of the characters. Not what they look like and what they really do and how many kids they have and the argument with their sister in-laws new husband or the argument last Christmas. No, they are concepts. A means to an end. Manufactured to tell a story. To tell us something. And for that they can be made hollow, so they are hollow, and that is fine. Maybe we are hollow too? … Anyways, the landscape, they do paint a picture, and maybe too much sometimes, but they do paint. The image is bleak though, and cruel, and wicked and rotten to the core. But it can be beautiful sometimes. Subjectively speaking.

The scenes: The scenes are all well thought through and often very precise. I like some of the stories more than others, and often it is related to this. The flow of movement from one place or character to the next. Years can fly by in the blink of an eye, some only minutes or hours, but they are there to show us. To let us see, and nothing else. Not to entertain really, only to amaze.

My experience: As you can probably tell I really like this short story collection, even thought I do prefer Teatro Grottesco and Songs of a Dead Dreamer (also Grimscribe). The Notebook of the Night part of the book is less visceral to me, despite it being dense. To me those stories are more like not-yet-fleshed-out full stories or philosophical expressions that could be make into a story, and something that didn't really fit into the book as a whole. It would have been better left out of this one. The Spectral Link had 2 good stories, but cannot compare to Noctuary. My rating of the individual stories are as follows (out of 10): Conversations in a Dead Language - 8; Prodigy of Dreams - 7; Mrs. Rinaldis Angel - 9; The Tsalal - 8; Mad Night of Atonement - 10; The Strange Design of Master Rignolo - 10; Voice in the Bones - 6; Notebook of the Night (21 very short stories, ie c. 1 page) - Not rated; Metaphysica Morum - 8; Small People - 6.

My overall score for Noctuary and The Spectral Link is 9 out of 10.

[Fábio · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Notebook of the Night", third part of Noctuary, is a huge letdown. The rest of the stories are very interesting, albeit somewhat thematically repetitive on the whole.