This is more a 3.5 star rating, but I went for 4 since the author is one of my favorite horror writers.As such, I find Thomas Ligotti very hard to read, and that is mostly a good thing, since his descriptions of dark vistas, nightly shadows and depictions, that felt like they came straight from a fever dream, are unique.However, there were moments when my mind was baffled by what I read that certain paragraphs I had to go through THREE TIMES!Out of the eight stories, the one that suited me the m...

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....

Loved Studies in Shadow. Loved 2/3 of Discourse on Blackness: Tsalal, Mad Night of Atonement, The Strange Design of Master Rignolo. Liked the other one just okay, certainly still well above the average "weird" story. I didn't care at all for Notebook of the Night, not that the pieces were bad, sort of prose poems, but I'm just not a big flash fiction fan and that's what it kind of seemed like to me. I found I just couldn't concentrate on these. I read them all through twice, some a third time be...

"Throughout my childhood, the dreams that I nightly experienced would become brutally vivid, causing me to awake screaming." Ligotti" dreams and visions nurtured in an atmosphere of sublime dread, growing overnight like some gaudy fungus in a forgotten cellar…" LigottiThose things that dwell in your dreams sometimes want to come out and play, or consume, or control. This book is all about those "creatures of the ID" which once released can not easily be put back where they came from. - Not only

Excellent! Really enjoyed these stories, especially the short ones that really can zap you. The art on the hardcover edition is quite scary and I had to turn the book face down on my night table because I couldn't stand the fierce eyes staring at me. "Voice in the Bones" and "Autumnal" are quite unsettling pieces, but my favorite is "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel." I like it so much I featured it as a free read on my short story blog http://paulacappa.wordpress.com/2014/.... Poe would certainly admire "T...

Standouts on a first reading:"The Prodigy of Dreams""The Tsalal""The Master's Eyes Shining With Secrets"

"No longer any world, any words, there would only be that narrow room and its two inseparable occupants. Nothing other than that would exist for him, could exist, nor in fact, had ever existed. In its own rose-tinted heart, his horror had at last found him."Ligotti at his most masochistic -- I don't think I've read any stories with Lovecraftian 'seekers after horror' as thoroughly doomed as those of 'The Medusa' and 'The Prodigy of Dreams'.

If I could only tell someone one Ligotti quote, this might be it:"... 'There is no nature to things you wrote in the book. 'There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.' You wrote that there is not true growth or evolution in the life of this world but only transformations of appearance, an incessant melting and molding of surfaces without underlying essence. Above all you pronounced that there is no salvation of any being because no beings exist as such, no...

In the foreword to this book, Ligotti writes a bit about weird fiction. He talks about how that type of fiction is about the unknown, and even describes the quintessential weird fiction story, which is one where a man reaches for his glasses in the dark, only to have someone place them into his hand. That’s the whole story, beginning, middle, and end, and while it’s certainly spooky (mostly due to the uncertainty on who — or what — placed the glasses into his hands), it doesn’t strike me as part...

This collection doesn't cause the spine to shiver quite as much as Teatro Grottesco. It was written years earlier, and one can't blame Ligotti for honing his craft. As with anything from this conjurer of uncanny, atmospheric places and scenes, the feelings this book evokes include excitement, fear (of course), listlessness, powerlessness, melancholy, hopelessness and despair.I cannot read Ligotti's fiction now without his non-fiction (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) having some influence....

Ligotti is probably technically a better writer than Lovecraft, but in older collections like this, less abstract and philosophical than later, his advantages show less and he seems more like just a more modern and polished version of Lovecraftian legends on the underlying black chaos of the insensible universe. Later on, he would drift towards a different sort of voice, conversational but overwrought and lost in self-reflection, like a pulp Bernhard, but that was all mostly to come at this poin...

I've been looking forward to reading something again by Ligotti for quite a while now. Having ploughed through (and thoroughly enjoyed) Teatro Grottesco and My Work Is Not Yet Done, the two most readily available collections of his fiction available. So I took advantage of one of his older collections briefly flashing in and out of print with Subterranean Press's run of limited edition hardbacks.It features an introduction by the author himself as he ruminates on the essential essence of the wei...

Although I liked Teatro Grottesco better than this collection, I found much to enjoy in Noctuary, which makes sense considering the former was published about a dozen years after the latter. Highlights for me include “The Medusa,” wherein the image of Medusa comes to represent self-aware, existential horror; “Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel,” in which dreams themselves are metaphysical parasites responsible for our mortality; “The Tsalal,” in which reality is revealed to be nothing more than a constantl...

This is a short story collection but at the same time it isn’t. The stories here form a whole, an ethereal tome of nihilistic nightmares and hypnotic prose. The horror isn’t visceral, the horror you feel is from the existential dread these bleak words deliver into the dark corners of your mind. The stories aren’t directly linked but are written in such a way that they bleed into one another, the end of one and start of another hazy and indistinct like fragments of a dream. This book needs to be

Not all that creepysomeone loves the word "blackness"short little nightmares.

I would say that this collection is somewhat "less prominent" and "doesn't get under the skin that much", but that's just how I feel, mostly because of the last part of the book...Let's talk about that first.The last part, Notebook of the Night, is exactly what it suggests it is- vignettes with quieter and subtler horrors, and soaked with philosophical overtones. Yes they didn't dig too deep an infection in my mind, at least after the first read anyway, and Ligotti is a writer whose works can be...

4.5Ligotti destroys you

My first Ligotti. Extremely convoluted and hard to read to the point of having to re-read certain paragraphs multiple times, which breaks immersion, especially for horror. And it becomes boring trying to 'fit' inside the lore when the lore itself is not scary nor creepy.The really short stories at the end, that convey a certain kind of dread are more immersive than those longer at the beginning of the book. Compared to Lovecraft for example, Ligotti writes more about the mundane while the horror...

Ligotti's name gets flashed a lot in the True Detective writeups, and this collection goes a long way towards explaining why. Very strong atmospherics, heavy purple dying-starlight dread, a lot of sound and a lot of fury signifying...not nothing but Nothing. Best stories are the obvious Lovecraft nods, "The Tsalal" (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) and "Mad Night of Atonement: A Future Tale" ("Nyarlathotep"). Part three of this collection, Notebook of the Night succeeds as a must-read-all-beginn...

not at all scary or unsettling unless you have a fear of boredom and pretentious, dull prose

First things first: have fun finding a copy of this. I personally found a digital copy of this on a library-like website where I had to wait for someone else to return it and then I had a timer to read it, like digital files couldn't be shared or downloaded. Alternatively, you can sell your first born and buy a copy, priced like they were eggs of dodo.Noctuary, Ligotti’s third collection, is perhaps the least visceral of the author’s work, far closer to Teatro Grottesco’s abstractions than Songs...

I always write the same thing about short stories, basically that they are just, you know, short, and yet I keep reading them. For once I am justified because Ligotti always writes the same thing too. Ultimately, all his stories (and especially those in the second part of this book) are encounters with the same villain and although that villain can never be directly described, it's safe to assume that it is existence itself. It's some indeterminate blackness that simultaneously encompasses every...

The final section of this, entitled "Notebook of the Night," is probably the best reason to dig in, especially if you're down to mainline multiple 3-4 page bursts of Ligottian dread (and it's really impressive how some of these 3-pagers are just as (if not more) effective than his 15-25 pagers.) The preceding short fiction is pretty good too. Short fiction ranked:1. The Tsalal2. The Prodigy of Dreams3. Conversations in a Dead Language4. The Medusa5. Mad Night of Atonement 6. The Strange Design o...

Even the negative reviews of Ligotti often have praise for his style. The perpetual argument surrounding him seems to be one of substance – that is, does he have any or is he pretentiously purveying empty pseudo-profundity? That’s not a question that can be quickly or easily answered (much less indisputably) but I will say this. When style is as distinct and exquisitely realised as Ligotti’s (obvious influences notwithstanding), it’s worthy of admiration in its own right.I will also say that the...

This gem of a story has a perfectly Gothic-Baroque prose texture (a texture original to this author) telling of a boy taken by his mother to be treated by what I shall call a Dream Healer, one called Mrs Rinaldi… Make of that what you will, after you have finished reading this work. Is she a charlatan or well-meaning botcher or another genuinely perverse Ligottian Doctor in her own right?This text represents a dream apotheosis of depletion, antiseptic attenuation, deprivation, maggoty parasitism...

After hearing so much about Ligotti, I had high expectations for this collection. Too high, perhaps. Reading Noctuary wasn't the revelatory experience I associate with my memories of The Stranger, Naked Lunch, or The Black Dahlia. It is, however, a damn good read. Lovecraft's influence bleeds through every space in between Ligotti's words here. The themes of alienation and the merging of dream and reality are both prominent. Ligotti is a better technician than Lovecraft, though, more elegant and...

Thomas Ligotti's stories are more compressed here than in a few of his other collections: the longest story here being 40 pages, but often many of the stories are just a few. This compression gives Ligotti's comsicism less space to articulate itself, so these stories have almost a darkly poetic quality. Ligotti's subtly can even dominate in very brief prose, but this may be more accessible than many of Ligotti's other works because of the compression of some of the stories.

Kinda in the middle of the road on this one. While the writing style and voice was appealing, the horror elements and concepts (foundational stuff) were lacking, underdeveloped or just uninteresting altogether. I read about half of the stories here and not one of them has stuck with me, even though (to the writer's credit) they went down nice-and-easy. Will check out more by Ligotti since, from a little research, popular opinion says this is one of his weakest collections.

Most of the stories in this appeared in The Nightmare Factory, but I want to read the flash fiction that didn't appear in it. My former roommate owned the book and I read a little, but didn't finish.

Some really good stuff and some quite sloppy early stuff, by his standards, which is still pretty tight by most writers’ standards. Enough with the cracked dolls’ heads and lifeless mannikins.