Noctuary

Not all that creepy
someone loves the word “blackness”
short little nightmares.

While Noctuary features some strikingly powerful stories, it's not an entirely successful collection and would seem to be a small let down from Ligotti's previous collection, Grimscribe. This may be because Noctuary, like Ligotti's debut Songs of a Dead Dreamer, is a transitional work. With Songs, it's clear that Ligotti was working to combine his literary influences with his own original voice and ideas to create something strikingly original yet very much within the tradition of weird fiction. This project would find it's full articulation in Grimscribe. Seen from the perspective of Songs and Grimscribe, Noctuary would seem to represent a step backwards or a sort of exhaustion. Ligotti has, of course, always trafficked in exhaustion whether Alice's weary adulthood as she faces her last adventures or the narrator's dismissal of horror stories in Nethescurial; yet realms of exhaustion often prove to be rather fertile for the generation of new horrors.

Among it's horrors are the death god of “The Prodigy of Dreams,” the supernatural vengeance of “Conversations in a Dead Language,” and the Lovecraftian dreams of “Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel,” all quite strong stories that feel somehow slight in this collection, as if Ligotti is spinning his wheels. One story, “The Tsalal,” while arguably along the same lines as much of the stories in Grimscribe, stands out because it is so powerfully crafted, perfectly structured and with the sort of shockingly inevitable ending that marks Ligotti's best work.

Other tales, such as “The Medusa,” in which an eccentric scholar seeks out the fabled monster whom he believes to be lurking in the every day world, or “Mad Night of Atonement,” in which a Nyarlathotep-like showman reveals the true will of God, feel markedly transitional, attempting to go a step beyond the previous confines of weird fiction, yet never quite making the leap. These stories, despite moments of brilliance, are somewhat disappointing, lacking the powerful build and surprise of Ligotti's previous works. Ligotti has, I believe, started to chafe against the bonds of his own chosen idiom, though this can be seen only from the perspective of his later work. With such collections as Teatro Grottesco, Ligotti would dispense with much of the Lovecraftian baroqueness of his earlier style, leaving behind the dark gods and forbidden texts, as well as stylistic flourishes, for a more banal and bleaker world. If stories such as “Medusa” and “Mad Night” disappoint, it is probably because Ligotti has already begun the process of trying to break free of his earlier style.

The final section of the novel is the Notebook of Night, a collection of brief vignette, rich in language and imagery but often nearly plotless. These also reveal Ligotti experimenting with how best to express his own dark concepts. This is my favorite section of the collection, since even those that don't quite work as tales still are full of wonderfully sinister atmosphere.